What’s Bred In the Bone by Grant Allen (page 3)

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!”

CHAPTER XVII.

VISIONS OF WEALTH.

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.”

CHAPTER XVIII.

GENTLE WOOER.

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, if _I_ still 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,

“GWENDOLINE.”

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.

CHAPTER XIX.

SELF OR BEARER.

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.”

CHAPTER XX.

MONTAGUE NEVITT FINESSES.

Guy rose mechanically, and followed him to the door. Nevitt still held the forged cheque in his hand. Guy thought of it so to himself in plain terms, as the forgery. Yet somehow, he knew not why, he followed that sinister figure through the passage and down the stairs like one irresistibly and magnetically drawn forward. Why, he couldn’t let any one go forth upon the streets of London–with the cheque he himself had forged in his hands–unwatched and unshadowed.

Nevitt called a cab; and jumped in, and beckoned him. Guy, still as in a dream, jumped after him hastily.

“To the London and West Country Bank, in Lombard Street,” Nevitt called through the flap.

The cab drove off; and Guy Waring leaned back, all trembling and irresolute, with his head on the cushions.

At last, after a short drive, during which Guy’s head seemed to be swimming most dreamily, they reached the bank–that crowded bank in Lombard Street. Nevitt thrust the cheque bodily into his companion’s hand.

“Take it in, now, and cash it,” he said with an authoritative air. “Do you hear what I say? Take it in–and cash it.”

Guy, as if impelled by some superior power, walked inside the door, and presented it timidly.

The cashier glanced at the sum inscribed on the cheque with no little surprise.

“It’s a rather large amount, Mr. Waring,” he said, scanning his face closely. “How will you take it?”

Guy trembled violently from head to foot as he answered, in a voice half choked with terror, “Bank of England hundreds, if you please. It is a large sum, as you say; but I’m placing it elsewhere.”

The cashier retired for a few minutes; then he returned once more, bringing a big roll of notes, and a second clerk by his side–just to prevent mistake–stared hard at the customer. “All square,” the second clerk said, in a half-whispered aside. “It’s him right enough.”

And the cashier proceeded to count out the notes with oft-wetted fingers.

Guy took them up mechanically, like a drunken man, counted them over one by one in a strange, dazed way; and staggered out at last to the cab to Nevitt.

Nevitt leaned forward and took the bundle from his hands. Guy stood on the pavement and looked vacantly in at him! “That’s right,” Nevitt said, clasping the bundle tight. “Rio Negro Diamond and Sapphire Mines, cabby, 127, Knatchbull Street, Cheapside.”

The cabman whipped up his horse and disappeared round the corner, leaving Guy Waring alone–like a fool–on the pavement.

For a minute or two the dazed and dazzled journalist stood there awaking by degrees as from some trance or stupefaction. At first he could only stand still and gaze vacantly down the street after the disappearing cab; but as his brain cleared slowly, and the mist that hung over his mind dispelled itself bit by bit, he was able to walk a few steps at a time towards the nearest shops, where he looked in at the windows intently with a hollow stare, and tried to collect his scattered wits for a great effort at understanding this strange transaction.

All at once, as he looked, the full folly of his deed burst in its true light upon his muddled brain. He had handed Nevitt six thousand pounds in Bank of England notes; to waste, or lose, or speculate, or run away with.

Six–thousand–pounds of Cyril’s money! Not that for one moment he suspected Nevitt. Guy Waring was too innocent to suspect anybody. But as he woke up more fully now to the nature of his own act, a horrible sense of guilt and pollution crept slowly over him. He put his hand ito his forehead. Cold sweat stood in clammy small drops upon his brow. Bit by bit, the hateful truth dawned clearly upon him. Nevitt had lured him by strange means, he knew not how, into hateful crime–into a disgraceful conspiracy. Word by word, the self-accusing sentence framed itself upon his lips.

He spoke it out, aloud: “Why–this–is forgery!”

Dazzled and stunned by the intensity of that awful awaking from some weird possession or suggestion of evil by a stronger mind, Guy Waring began to walk on in a feverish fashion, fast, fast, oh, so fast, not knowing where he went, but conscious only that he must keep moving, lest an accusing conscience should gnaw his very heart out.

Whither, he hadn’t as yet the faintest idea. His whole being for the moment was centred and summed up in that unspeakable remorse. He had done a great wrong. He had made himself a felon. And now, in the first recoil of his revolted nature, he must go after the man who held the evidences of his guilt, and by force or persuasion demand them at once from him. Those notes were Cyril’s. He must get them. He must get them.

Possessed by this one idea, with devouring force, but still in a very nebulous and hazy form, Guy began walking towards the Strand and the Embankment, at the hot top of his speed, to get the notes back–at Montague Nevitt’s chambers. He had walked with fiery zeal in that wrong direction for nearly a mile, his heart burning within him all the way, and his brain in a whirl, before it began to strike him, in a flash of common sense, that Montague Nevitt wouldn’t be there at all. He had driven off to the office. Guy clapped his hand to his forehead once more, in an agony of remorse. Great heavens, what folly! He had heard him tell the cabman the address himself–“127, Knatchbull Street, Cheapside.”

Even now he hadn’t sense enough to hail a cab and go after him. His faculties were still numbed and entranced by that horrible spell of Montague Nevitt’s eye. He had but one thought–to walk on, walk hastily. He tramped along the streets in the direction of Cheapside, straining every muscle to arrive at the office before Nevitt had parted with Cyril’s six thousand–but he never even thought of saving the precious moments by driving the distance between instead of walking it. Montague Nevitt’s personality still weighed down half his brain, and rendered his mind almost childish or imbecile.

Hurrying on so through the crowded streets, now walking, now running, now pausing, now panting, knocking up here against a little knot of wayfarers, and delayed again there by an untimely block at some crowded crossing, he turned the corner at last with a beating heart into the narrow pavement of an alley marked up as Knatchbull Street. Number 127 was visible from afar.

A mob of excited people marked its site by loitering about the door. Two policemen held off the angrier spirits among the shareholders. But, nothing daunted by the press, Guy forced his way in and looked around the room trembling, for Montague Nevitt. Too late! Too late! Nevitt wasn’t there. The unhappy dupe turned to the clerk in charge.

“Has Mr. Montague Nevitt been here?” he asked, in a voice all tremulous with emotion.

“Mr. Montague Nevitt?” the clerk responded. “Just gone ten minutes ago. Came to settle Mr. Whitley’s call–his brother-in-law’s. Went off in a cab. Can I do anything for you?”

“He’s paid in six thousand pounds?” Guy gasped out interrogatively.

The clerk gazed at him hard with a suspicious glance. “Are you a shareholder?” he asked, with one eye on the policeman. “What do you want to know for?”

“Yes, I’m a shareholder, unfortunately,” Guy answered, still in a maze. “I hold three hundred original shares. My name’s Guy Waring. You’ve got me on your books. Mr. Nevitt has paid three thousand in Mr. Whitley’s name, and three thousand for me. That was our arrangement.”

The clerk glanced hard at him again. “Waring!” he repeated, turning over the leaves of his big book for further verification. “Waring! Waring! Waring! Ah, here it is; Waring, Guy; journalist; 22, Staple Inn; 300 shares. Three hundred pounds paid. Then we call up to three thousand. No, Mr. Nevitt didn’t settle for you, sir. He paid Mr. Whitley’s call in full. That was all. Nothing else. You’re still our debtor.”

“He didn’t pay up!” Guy exclaimed, clapping his hands to his head, all the black guile and treachery of the man coining home to him at once, at one fell blow. “He didn’t pay up for me! Oh, this is too, too terrible!”

He paused for a moment. Floods of feeling rushed over him. He knew now that he had committed that forgery for nothing. Cyril’s money was gone. And Montague Nevitt had stolen the three thousand Guy intrusted to him at the bank for the second payment. Yet Guy knew he had no legal remedy save by acknowledging the forgery! This was almost more than human nature could stand. If Montague Nevitt had been by his side that moment Guy would have leapt at his throat, and it would have gone hard with him if he had left the villain living.

He clapped his hands to his ears in the horror and agony of that hideous disclosure.

“The thief!” he cried aloud, in a choking voice. “Did he pay what he paid from a big roll of notes, and did he take the rest of the notes in the roll away with him?”

“Yes, just so,” the clerk answered calmly. “He didn’t mention your name. But perhaps he’s coming back by-and-by to settle for you.”

Guy knew better. He saw through the man’s whole black nature at once.

“I’ve been robbed,” he said slowly. “I’ve been robbed and deserted. I must follow the man and compel him to disgorge. When I’ve got the cash back I’ll return and pay you. … No, I won’t, though. I forgot. I’ll take it home to the bank for Cyril.”

The clerk gazed at him with a smile of pitying contempt. Mad, mad; quite mad! The loss of his fortune had, no doubt, unhinged this shareholder’s reason. But Guy, never heeding him, rushed out into the street and hailed a passing cab.

“Temple Flats,” he cried aloud, and drove to Nevitt’s chambers. Too late, once more! The housekeeper told him Mr. Nevitt was out. He’d just started off, portmanteau and all, as hard as a hansom could drive, to Waterloo Station.

“Waterloo, then!” Guy shouted, in wild despair, to the cabman. “We must follow this man post haste. Alive or dead, I won’t rest till I catch him!”

It was an unhappy phrase. In the events that came after, it was remembered against him.

CHAPTER XXI.

COLONEL KELMSCOTT’S PUNISHMENT.

While Montague Nevitt was thus congenially engaged in pulling off his treble coup of settling his own share in the Rio Negro deficit, pocketing three thousand pounds, pro tem, for incidental expenses, and getting Guy Waring thoroughly into his power by his knowledge of a forgery, two other events were taking place elsewhere, which were destined to prove of no small importance to the future of the twins and their immediate surroundings. Things generally were converging towards a crisis in their affairs. Colonel Kelmscott’s wrong-doing was bearing first-fruit abundantly.

For as soon as Granville Kelmscott received that strangely-worded note from Gwendoline Gildersleeve, he proceeded, as was natural, straight down, in his doubt, to his father’s library. There, bursting into the room, with Gwendoline’s letter still crushed in his hand in the side pocket of his coat, and a face like thunder, he stood in the attitude of avenging fate before his father’s chair, and gazed down upon him angrily.

“What does THIS mean?” he asked, in a low but fuming voice, brandishing the note before his eyes as he spoke. “Is every one in the county to be told it but I? Is everybody else to hear my business before you tell me a word of it? A letter comes to me this morning–no matter from whom–and here’s what it says: ‘I know you’re not the eldest son, and that somebody else is the heir of Tilgate.’ Surely, if anybody was to know, _I_ should have known it first. Surely, if I’m to be turned adrift on the world, after being brought up to think myself a man of means so long, I should, at least, be turned adrift with my eyes open.”

Colonel Kelmscott gazed at him open-mouthed with horror.

“Did Gwendoline Gildersleeve write that to you?” he cried, overpowered at once by remorse and awe. “Did Gwendoline Gildersleeve write that to you? Well, if Gwendoline Gildersleeve knows it, it’s all up with the scheme! That rascally lawyer, her father, has found out everything. These two young men must have put their case in the fellow’s hands. He must be hunting up the facts. He must be preparing to contest it. My boy, my boy, we’re ruined! we’re ruined!”

“These two young men,” Granville repeated, with a puzzled air of surprise. “WHAT two young men? I don’t know them. I never heard of them.” Then suddenly one of those flashes of intuition burst in upon him that burst in upon us all at moments of critical importance to our lives. “Father, father,” he cried, loaning forward in his anguish and clutching the oak chair, “you don’t mean to tell me those fellows, the Warings, that we met at Chetwood Court, are your lawful sons–and that THAT was why you bought the landscape with the snake in it?”

Kelmscott, of Tilgate, bent his proud head down to the table unchecked. “My son, my son,” he cried, in his despair, “you have said it yourself. Your own mouth has suggested it. What use my trying to keep it from you any longer? These lads–are Kelmscotts.”

“And–my mother?” Granville Kelmscott burst out, in a very tremulous voice. The question was almost more than a man dare ask. But he asked it in the first bitterness of a terrible awakening.

“Your mother,” Colonel Kelmscott answered, lifting his head once more, with a terrible effort, and looking his son point-blank in the face–“your mother is just what I have always called her–my lawful wife–Lady Emily Kelmscott. The mother of these lads, to whom I was also once duly married, died before my marriage with my present wife–thank God I can say so. I may have acted foolishly, cruelly, criminally; but at least I never acted quite so basely and so ill as you impute to me, Granville.”

“Thank Heaven for that,” his son answered fervently, with one hand on his breast, drawing a deep sigh as he spoke. “You’re my father, sir, and it isn’t for me to reproach you; but if you had only done THAT–oh, my mother! my mother! I don’t know, sir, I’m sure, how I could ever have forgiven you; I don’t know how I could ever have kept my hands off you.”

Colonel Kelmscott straightened himself up, and looked hard at his son. A terrible pathos gleamed in his proud brown eyes. His white moustache had more dignity than ever.

“Granville,” he said slowly, like a broken man, “I don’t ask you to forgive me; you can never forgive me; I don’t ask you to sympathise with me; a father knows better than to accept sympathy from a son; but I do ask you to bear with me while I try to explain myself.”

He braced himself up, and with many long pauses, and many inarticulate attempts to set forth the facts in the least unfavourable aspect, told his story all through, in minute detail, to that hardest of all critics, his own dispossessed and disinherited boy.

“If you’re hard upon me, Granville,” he cried at last as he finished, looking wistfully for pity into his son’s face, “you should remember, at least, it was for your sake I did it, my boy; it was for your sake I did it–yours, yours, and your mother’s.”

Granville let him relate his whole story in full to the bitter end, though it was with difficulty at times that that proud and grey-haired man nerved himself up to tell it. Then, as soon as all was told, he looked in his father’s face once more, and said slowly, with the pitilessness of sons in general towards the faults and failings of their erring parents–

“It’s not my place to blame you, I know. You did it, I suppose, as you say so, for me and my mother. But it IS my place to tell you plainly, father, that I, for one, will have nothing at all to do with the fruits of your deception. I was no party to the fraud; I will be no party either to its results or its clearing up. I, too, have to think, as you say, of my mother. For her sake, I won’t urge you to break her heart at once by disinheriting her son, now and here, too openly. You can make what arrangements you like with these blood-sucking Warings. You can do as you will in providing them with hush-money. Let them take their black-mail! You’ve handed them over half the sum you got for Dowlands already, I suppose. You can buy them off for awhile by handing them over the remainder. Twelve thousand will do. Leeches as they are, that will surely content them, at least for the present.”

Colonel Kelmscott raised one hand and tried hard to interrupt him; but Granville would not be interrupted.

“No, no,” he went on sternly, shaking his head and frowning. “I’ll have my say for once, and then for ever keep silence. This is the first and last time as long as we both live I will speak with you on the subject. So we may as well understand one another, once and for ever. For my mother’s sake, as I said, there need be just at present no open disclosure. You have years to live yet; and as long as you live, these Waring people have no claim upon the estate in any way. You’ve given them as much as they’ve any right to expect. Let them wait for the rest till, in the course of nature, they come into possession. As for me, I will go to carve out for myself a place in the world elsewhere by my own exertions. Perhaps, before my mother need know her son was left a beggar by the father who brought him up like the heir to a large estate, I may have been able to carve out that place for myself so well that she need never really feel the difference. I’m a Kelmscott, and can fight the world on my own account. But, in any case, I must go. Tilgate’s no longer a fit home for me. I leave it to those who have a better right to it.”

He rose as if to depart, with the air of a man who sets forth upon the world to seek his fortune. Colonel Kelmscott rose too, and faced him, all broken.

“Granville,” he said, in a voice scarcely audible through the stifled sobs he was too proud to give vent to, “you’re not going like this. You’re not going without at least shaking hands with your father! You’re not going without saying good-bye to your mother!”

Granville turned, with hot tears standing dim in his eyes–like his father, he was too proud to let them trickle down his cheek–and taking the Colonel’s weather-beaten hand in his, wrung it silently for some minutes with profound emotion.

Then he looked at the white moustache, the grizzled hair, the bright brown eyes suffused with answering dimness, and said, almost remorsefully, “Father, good-bye. You meant me well, no doubt. You thought you were befriending me. But I wish to Heaven in my soul you had meant me worse. It would have been easier for me to bear in the end. If you’d brought me up as a nobody–as a younger son’s accustomed–” He paused and drew back, for he could see his words were too cruel for that proud man’s heart. Then he broke off suddenly.

“But I CAN’T say good-bye to my mother,” he went on, with a piteous look. “If I tried to say good-bye to her, I must tell her all. I’d break down in the attempt. I’ll write to her from the Cape. It’ll be easier so. She won’t feel it so much then.”

“From the Cape!” Colonel Kelmscott exclaimed, drawing back in horror. “Oh, Granville, don’t tell me you’re going away from us to Africa!”

“Where else?” his son asked, looking him back in the face steadily. “Africa it is! That’s the only opening left nowadays for a man of spirit. There, I may be able to hew out a place for myself at last, worthy of Lady Emily Kelmscott’s son. I won’t come back till I come back able to hold my own in the world with the best of them. These Warings shan’t crow over the younger son. Good-bye, once more, father.” He wrung his hand hard. “Think kindly of me when I’m gone; and don’t forget altogether I once loved Tilgate.”

He opened the door and went up to his own room again. His mind was resolved. He wouldn’t even say good-bye to Gwendoline Gildersleeve. He’d pack a few belongings in a portmanteau in haste, and go forth upon the world to seek his fortune in the South African diamond fields.

But Colonel Kelmscott sat still in the library, bowed down in his chair, with his head between his hands, in abject misery. A strange feeling seemed to throb through his weary brain; he had a sensation as though his skull were opening and shutting. Great veins on his forehead beat black and swollen. The pressure was almost more than the vessels would stand. He held his temples between his two palms as if to keep them from bursting. All ahead looked dark as night; the ground was cut from under him. The punishment of his sin was too heavy for him to bear. How could he ever tell Emily now that Granville was gone? A horrible numbness oppressed his brain. Oh, mercy! mercy! his head was flooded.

CHAPTER XXII.

CROSS PURPOSES.

At the Gildersleeves’, too, the house that day was alive with excitement.

Gwendoline had thrown herself into a fever of alarm as soon as she had posted her letter to Granville Kelmscott. She went up to her own room, flung herself wildly on the hed, and sobbed herself into a half-hysterical, half-delirious state, long before dinner-time. She hardly knew herself at first how really ill she was. Her hands were hot and her forehead burning. But she disregarded such mere physical and medical details as those, by the side of a heart too full for utterance. She thought only of Granville, and of that horrid man who had threatened with such evident spite and rancour to ruin him.

She lay there some hours alone, in a high fever, before her mother came up to her room to fetch her. Mrs. Gildersleeve was a subdued and soft-voiced woman, utterly crushed, so people said, by the stronger individuality of that blustering, domineering, headstrong man, her husband. And to say the truth, the eminent Q.C. had taken all the will out of her in twenty-three years of obedient slavery. She was pretty still, to be sure, in a certain faded, jaded, unassuming way; but her patient face wore a constant expression of suppressed terror, as if she expected every moment to be the victim of some terrible and unexplained exposure. And that feature at least in her idiosyncrasy could hardly be put down to Gilbert Gildersleeve’s account; for hectoring and strong-minded as the successful Q.C. was known to be, nobody could for a moment accuse him in any definite way of deliberate unkindness to his wife or daughter. On the contrary, he was tender and indulgent to them to the last degree, as he understood those virtues. It was only by constant assertion of his own individuality, and constant repression or disregard of theirs, that he had broken his wife’s spirit and was breaking his daughter’s. He treated them as considerately as one treats a pet dog, doing everything for them that care and money could effect, except to admit for a moment their claim to independent opinions and actions of their own, or to allow the possibility of their thinking and feeling on any subject on earth one nail’s breadth otherwise than as he himself did.

At sight of Gwendoline, Mrs. Gildersleeve came over to the bed with a scared and startled air, felt her daughter’s face tenderly with her hands for a moment, and then cried in alarm, “Why, Gwennie, what’s this? Your cheeks are burning! Who on earth has been here? Has that horrid man come down again from London to worry you?”

Gwendoline looked up and tried to prevaricate. But conscience was too strong for her; the truth would out for all that. “Yes, mother,” she cried, after a pause, “and he said, oh, he said–I could never tell you what dreadful things he said. But he’s so wicked, so cruel! You never knew such a man! He thinks I want to marry Granville Kelmscott, and so he told me–” She broke off, of a sudden, unable to proceed, and buried her face in her hands, sobbing long and bitterly.

“Well, what did he tell you, dear?” Mrs. Gildersleeve asked, with that frightened air, as of a startled wild thing, growing deeper than ever upon her countenance as she uttered the question.

“He told me–oh, he told me–I can’t tell you what he told me; but he threatened to ruin us–he threatened it so dreadfully. It was a hateful threat. He seemed to have found out something that he knew would be our ruin. He frightened me to death. I never heard any one say such things as he did.”

Mrs. Gildersleeve drew back in profound agitation. “Found out something that would be our ruin!” she cried, with white face all aghast. “Oh, Gwennie, what do you mean? Didn’t he tell you what it was? Didn’t he try to explain to you? He’s a wicked, wicked man –so cruel, so unscrupulous! He gets one’s secrets into his hands, by underhand means, and then uses them to make one do whatever he chooses. I see how it is. He wants to force us into letting him marry you–into making you marry him! Oh, Gwennie, this is hard. Didn’t he tell you at all what it was he knew? Didn’t he give you a hint what sort of secret he was driving at?”

Gwendoline looked up once more, and murmured low through her sobs, “No, he didn’t say what it was. He’s too cunning for that. But I think–I think it was something about Granville. Mother, I never told you, but you know I love him! I think it was something about HIM, though I can’t quite make sure. Some secret about somebody not being properly married, or something of that sort. I didn’t quite understand. You see, he was so discreetly vague and reticent.”

Mrs. Gildersleeve drew back her face all aghast with horror. “Some secret–about somebody–not being properly married!” she repeated slowly, with wild terror in her eyes.

“Yes, mother,” Gwendoline gasped out, with an effort once more. “It was about somebody not being really the proper heir; he made me promise I wouldn’t tell; but I don’t know how to keep it. He was immensely full of it; it was an awful secret; and he said he would ruin us–ruin us ruthlessly. He said we were in his power, and he’d crush us under his heel. And, oh, when he said it, you should have seen his face. It was horrible, horrible. I’ve seen nothing else since. It dogs me–it haunts me.”

Mrs. Gildersleeve sat down by the bedside wringing her hands in silence. “It’s too late to-night,” she said at last, after a long deep pause, and in a voice like a woman condemned to death, “too late to do anything; but to-morrow your father must go up to town and try to see him. At all costs we must buy him off. He knows everything–that’s clear. He’ll ruin us. He’ll ruin us!”

“It’s no use papa going up to town, though,” Gwendoline answered half dreamily. “That dreadful man said he was going away for his holiday to the country at once. He’ll be gone to-morrow.”

“Gone? Gone where?” Mrs. Gildersleeve cried, in the same awestruck voice.

“To Devonshire,” Gwendoline replied, shutting her eyes hard and still seeing him.

Mrs. Gildersleeve echoed the phrase in a startled cry. “To Devonshire, Gwendoline! To Devonshire! Did he say to Devonshire?”

“Yes,” Gwendoline went on slowly, trying to recall his very words. “To the skirts of Dartmoor, I think he said; to a place in the wilds by the name of Mambury.”

“Mambury!”

The terror and horror that frail and faded woman threw into the one word fairly startled Gwendoline. She opened her eyes and stared aghast at her mother. And well she might, for the effect was electrical. Mrs. Gildersleeve was sitting there, transfixed with awe and some unspeakable alarm; her figure was rigid; her face was dead white; her mouth was drawn down with a convulsive twitch; she clasped her bloodless hands on her knees in mute agony. For a moment she sat there like a statue of flesh. Then, as sense and feeling came back to her by slow degrees, she could but rock her body up and down in her chair with a short swaying motion, and mutter over and over again to herself in that same appalled and terrified voice, “Mambury–Mambury–Mambury–Mambury.”

“That was the name, I’m sure,” Gwendoline went on, almost equally alarmed. “On a hunt after records, he said; on a hunt after records. Whatever it was he wanted to prove, I suppose he knew that was the place to prove it.”

Mrs. Gildersleeve rose, or to speak with more truth, staggered slowly to her feet, and, steadying herself with an effort, made blindly for the door, groping her way as she went, like some faint and wounded creature. She said not a word to Gwendoline. She had no tongue left for speech or comment. She merely stepped on, pale and white, pale and white, like one who walks in her sleep, and clutched the door-handle hard to keep her from falling. Gwendoline, now thoroughly alarmed, followed her close on her way to the top of the stairs. There Mrs. Gildersleeve paused, turned round to her daughter with a mute look of anguish and held up one hand, palm outward, appealingly, as if on purpose to forbid her from following farther. At the gesture, Gwendoline fell back, and looked after her mother with straining eyes. Mrs. Gildersleeve staggered on, erect, yet to all appearance almost incapable of motion, and stumbled down the stairs, and across the hall, and into the drawing-room opposite. The rest Gwendoline neither saw, nor heard, nor guessed at. She crept back into her own room, and, flinging herself on her bed alone as she stood, cried still more piteously and miserably than ever.

Down in the drawing-room, however, Mrs. Gildersleeve found the famous Q.C. absorbed in the perusal of that day’s paper. She came across towards him, pale as a ghost, and with ashen lips. “Gilbert,” she said slowly, blurting it all out in her horror, without one word of warning, “that dreadful man Nevitt has seen Gwennie again, and he’s told her he knows all, and he means to ruin us, and he’s heard of the marriage, and he’s gone down to Mambury to hunt up the records!”

The eminent Q.C. let the paper drop from his huge red hands in the intensity of his surprise, while his jaw fell in unison at so startling and almost incredible a piece of intelligence. “Nevitt knows all!” he exclaimed, half incredulous. “He means to ruin us! And he told this to Gwendoline! Gone down to Mambury! Oh no, Minnie, impossible! You must have made some mistake. What did she say exactly? Did she mention Mambury?”

“She said it exactly as I’ve said it now to you,” Mrs. Gildersleeve persisted with a stony stare. “He’s gone down to Devonshire, she said; to the borders of Dartmoor, on a hunt after the records; to a place in the wilds by the name of Mambury. Those were her very words. I could stake my life on each syllable. I give them to you precisely as she gave them to me.”

Mr. Gildersleeve gazed across at her with the countenance which had made so many a nervous witness quake at the Old Bailey. “Are you QUITE sure of that, Minnie?” he asked, in his best cross-examining tone. “Quite sure she said Mambury, all of her own accord? Quite sure you didn’t suggest it to her, or supply the name, or give her a hint of its whereabouts, or put her a leading question?”

“Is it likely I’d suggest it to her?” the meekest of women answered, aroused to retort for once, and with her face like a sheet. “Is it likely I’d tell her? Is it likely I’d give my own girl the clue? She said it all of herself, I tell you, without one word of prompting. She said it just as I repeated it–to a place in the wilds by the name of Mambury.”

Gilbert Gildersleeve whistled inaudibly to himself. ‘Twas his way when he felt himself utterly nonplussed. This was very strange news. He didn’t really understand it. But he rose and confronted his wife anxiously. That overbearing big man was evidently stirred by this untoward event to the very depths of his nature.

“Then Gwennie knows all!” he cried, the blood rushing purple into his ruddy flushed cheeks. “The wretch! The brute! He must have told her everything!”

“Oh, Gilbert,” his wife answered, sinking into a chair in her horror, “even HE couldn’t do that–not to my own very daughter! And he didn’t do it, I’m sure. He didn’t dare–coward as he is, he couldn’t be quite so cowardly. She doesn’t guess what it means. She thinks it’s something, I believe, about Granville Kelmscott. She’s in love with young Kelmscott, as I told you long ago, and everything to her mind takes some colour from that fancy. I don’t think it ever occurred to her, from what she says, this has anything at all to do with you or me, Gilbert.”

The Q.C. reflected. He saw at once he was in a tight corner. That boisterous man, with the burly big hands, looked quite subdued and crestfallen now. He could hardly have snubbed the most unassuming junior. This was a terrible thing, indeed, for a man so unscrupulous and clever as Montague Nevitt to have wormed out of the registers. How he could ever have wormed it out Gilbert Gildersleeve hadn’t the faintest idea, Why, who on earth could have shown him the entry of that fatal marriage–Minnie’s first marriage–the marriage with that wretch who died in Portland prison–the marriage that was celebrated at St. Mary’s, at Mambury? He couldn’t for a moment conceive, for nobody but themselves, he fondly imagined, had ever identified Mrs. Gilbert Gildersleeve, the wife of the eminent Q.C., with that unhappy Mrs. Read, the convict’s widow. The convict’s widow. Ah, there was the rub. For she was really a widow in name alone when Gilbert Gildersleeve married her.

And Montague Nevitt, that human ferret, with his keen sharp eyes, and his sleek polite ways, had found it all out in spite of them–had hunted up the date of Read’s death and their marriage, and had bragged how he was going down to Mambury to prove it!

All the Warings and Reads always got married at Widdicombe or Mambury. There were lots of them on the books there, that was one comfort, anyhow. He’d have a good search to find his needle in such a pottle of hay. But to think the fellow should have, had the double-dyed cruelty to break the shameful secret first of all to Gwendoline! That was his vile way of trying to force a poor girl into an unwilling consent. Gilbert Gildersleeve lifted his burly big hands in front of his capacious waistcoat, and pressed them together angrily. If only he had that rascal’s throat well between them at that moment! He’d crush the fellow’s windpipe till he choked him on the spot, though he answered for it before the judges of assize to-morrow!

“There’s only one thing possible for it, Minnie,” he said at last, drawing a long deep breath. “I must go down to Mambury to-morrow to be beforehand with him. And I must either buy him off; or else, if that won’t do–“

“Or else what, Gilbert?”

She trembled like an aspen leaf.

“Or else get at the books in the vestry myself,” the Q.C. muttered low between his clenched teeth, “before the fellow has time to see them and prove it.”

CHAPTER XXIII.

GUY IN LUCK.

Guy Waring reached Waterloo ten minutes too late. Nevitt had gone on by the West of England express. The porter at the labelling place “minded the gentleman well.” He was a sharp-looking gentleman, with a queer look about the eyes, and a dark moustache curled round at the corners.

“Yes, yes,” Guy cried eagerly, “that’s him right enough. The eyes mark the man. And where was he going to?”

“He had his things labelled,” the porter said, “for Plymouth.”

“And when does the next train start?” Guy inquired, all on fire.

The porter, consulting the time-table in the muddle-headed way peculiar to railway porters, and stroking his chin with his hand to assist cerebration, announced, after a severe internal struggle, that the 3.45 down, slow, was the earliest train available.

There was nothing for it then, Guy perceived, but to run home to his rooms, possessing his soul in patience, pack up a few things in his Gladstone bag, and return at his leisure to catch the down train thus unfavourably introduced to his critical notice.

If Guy had dared, to be sure, he might have gone straight to a police-station, and got an inspector to telegraph along the line to stop the thief with his booty at Basingstoke or Salisbury. But Guy didn’t dare. For to interfere with Nevitt now by legal means would be to risk the discovery of his own share in the forgery. And from that risk the startled and awakened young man shrank for a thousand reasons; though the chief among them all was certainly one that never would have occurred to any one but himself as even probable.

He didn’t wish Elma Clifford to know that the man she loved, and the man who loved her, had become that day a forger’s brother.

To be sure, he had only seen Elma once–that afternoon at the Holkers’ garden-party. But, as Cyril himself knew, he had fallen in love with her at first sight–far more immediately, indeed, than even Cyril himself had done. Blood, as usual, was thicker than water. The points that appealed to one brother appealed also to the other, but with this characteristic difference, that Guy, who was the more emotional and less strong-willed of the two, yielded himself up at the very first glance to the beautiful stranger, while Cyril required some further acquaintance before quite giving way and losing his heart outright to her. And from that first meeting forward, Guy had carried Elma Clifford’s image engraved upon his memory–as he would carry it, he believed, to his dying day. Not, to be sure, that he ever thought for a moment of endeavouring to win her away from his brother. She was Cyril’s discovery, and to Cyril, therefore, he yielded her up, as of prior right, though with a pang of reluctance. But now that he stood face to face at last with his own accomplished crime, the first thought that rose in his mind spontaneous was for Elma’s happiness. He must never let Elma Clifford know that the man she loved, and would doubtless marry, was now by HIS act–a forger’s brother.

Three forty-five arrived at last, and Guy set off, all trembling, on his fatal quest. As he sped along, indignant at heart with Nevitt’s black treachery, on the line to Plymouth, he had plenty of time to revolve these things abundantly in his own soul. And when, after a long and dusty drive, he reached Plymouth, late at night, he could learn nothing for the moment about Montague Nevitt’s movements. So he was forced to go quietly for the evening to the Duke of Devonshire Hotel, and there wait as best he might to see how events would next develop themselves.

A day passed away–two days–but nothing turned up. Guy wasted much time in Plymouth making various inquiries before he learnt at last that a man with a queer look about the eyes, and a moustache with waxed ends, had gone down a night or so earlier by the other line to a station at the foot of Dartmoor, by the name of Mambury.

No sooner, however, had he learnt this promising news, than he set off at once, hot at heart as ever, to pursue the robber. That wretch shouldn’t get away scot free with his booty; Guy would follow him and denounce him to the other end of the universe! When he reached Mambury, he went direct to the village inn and asked, with trembling lips, if Mr. Montague Nevitt was at present staying there. The landlord shook his head with a stubborn, rustic negative. “No, we arn’t a-got no gentleman o’ thik there name in the house,” he said; “fact is, zur, to tell ‘ee the truth, we arn’t a-had nobody stoppin’ in the Arms at all lately, ‘cep’ it might be a gentleman come down from London, an’ it was day afore yesterday as he did come, an’ he do call ‘unself McGregor.”

Quick as lightning, Guy suspected Nevitt might be passing under a false name. What more likely, indeed, seeing he had made off with Guy’s three thousand pounds?

“And what sort of a man is this McGregor?” he asked hastily, putting his suspicion into shape. “What age? What height? What kind of a person to look at?”

“Wull, he’s a vine upstandin’ zart of a gentleman,” the landlord answered glibly in his own dialect; “as proper a gentleman as you’d wish to zee in a day’s march; med be about your height, zur, or a trifle more, has his moustaches curled round zame as if it med be a bellick’s harns; an’ a strange zart o’ a look about his eyes, too, as if ur could zee right drew an’ drew ‘ee.”

“That’s him!” Guy exclaimed, with a start, in profound excitement. “That’s the fellow, sure enough. I know him. I know him. And where is he now, landlord? Is he in the house? Can I see him?”

“Well, no, ‘ee can’t zee him, zur,” the landlord answered, eyeing the stranger askance; “he be out, jest at present. He do go vur a walk, mostly, down yonner in the bottom alongside the brook. Mebbe if you was to vollow by river-bank you med come up wi’ him by-an’-by … and mebbe, agin, you medn’t.”

“I’ll follow him,” Guy exclaimed, growing more excited than ever, now this quarry was almost well within sight; “I’ll follow him till I find him, the confounded rascal. I’ll follow him to his grave. He shan’t get away from me.”

The landlord looked at him with a dubious frown. That one could smile and smile and be a villain didn’t enter into his simple rustic philosophy.

“He’s a pleasant-spoken gentleman is Maister McGregor,” the honest Devonian said, with a tinge of disapprobation in his thick voice. “What vur do ‘ee want to vind ‘un? That’s what _I_ wants to know. He don’t look like one as did ever hurt a vlea. Such a soft zart of a voice. An’ he do play on the viddle that beautiful–that beautiful, why, ’tis the zame if he war a angel from heaven. Viddler Moore, he wur up here wi’ his music last night; an’ Maister McGregor, he took the instrument vrom un, an’ ‘Let ME have a try, my vrend,’ says he, all modest and unassoomin’; and vi’ that, he wounded it up, an’ he begun to play. Lard, how he did play. Never heard nothing like it in all my barn days. It is the zame, vor all the world, as you do hear they viddler chaps that plays by themselves in the Albert Hall up to London. Depend upon it, zur, there ain’t no harm in HIM. A vullow as can play on the viddle like thik there, why, he couldn’t do no hurt, not to child nor chicken.”

Guy turned away from the door, fretting and fuming inwardly. He knew better than that. Nevitt’s consummate mastery of his chosen instrument was but of a piece, after all, with the way he could play on all the world, as on a familiar gamut. It was the very skill of the man that made him so dangerous and so devilish. Guy felt that under the spell of Nevitt’s eye he himself was but as clay in the hands of the potter.

But Nevitt should never so trick him and twist him again. To that his mind was now fully made up. He would never let that cold eye hold him fixed as of yore by its steely glance. Once for all, Nevitt had proved his power too well. Guy would take good care he never subjected himself in future to that uncanny influence. One forgery was enough. Henceforth he was adamant.

And yet? And yet he was going to seek out Nevitt; going to stand face to face with that smiling villain again; going to tax him with his crime; going to ask him what he meant by this double-dyed treachery.

The landlord had told him where Nevitt was most likely to be found. He followed that direction. At a gate that turned by the river-bank, twenty minutes from the inn, a small boy was seated. He was a Devonshire boy of the poorest moorland type, short, squat, and thick set. As Guy reached the gate, the boy rose and opened it, pulling his forelock twice or thrice, expectant of a ha’penny. “Has anybody gone down here?” Guy asked, in an excited voice.

And the boy answered promptly, “Yes, thik there gentleman, what’s stoppin’ at the Talbot Arms. And another gentleman, too; o’ny t’other one come after and went t’other way round. A big zart o’ a gentleman wi’ ‘ands vit vor two. He axed me the zame question, had anybody gone by. This is dree of ‘ee as has come zince I’ve been a zitting here.”

Guy paid no attention to the second-named gentleman, with the hands fit for two, or to his inquiries after who might have gone before him. He fastened at once on the really important and serious information that the person who was stopping at the Talbot Arms had shortly before turned down the side footpath.

“All right, my boy,” he said, tossing the lad sixpence, the first coin he came across in his waistcoat pocket. The boy opened his eyes wide, and pocketed it with a grin. So unexpected a largess sufficed to impress the handsome stranger firmly on his memory. He didn’t forget him when a few days later he was called on to give evidence–at a coroner’s inquest.

But Guy, unsuspicious of the harm he had done himself, walked on, all on fire, down the woodland path. It was a shady path, and it led through a deep dell arched with hazels on every side, while a little brawling brook ran along hard by, more heard than seen, in the bottom of the dingle. Thick bramble obscured the petty rapids from view and half trailed their lush shoots here and there across the pathway. It was just such a mossy spot as Cyril would have loved to paint; and Guy, himself half an artist by nature, would in any other mood have paused to gaze delighted on its tangled greenery.

As it was, however, he was in no mood to loiter long over ferns and mosses. He walked down that narrow way, where luxuriant branches of fresh green blackberry bushes encroached upon the track, still seething in soul, and full of the bitter wrong inflicted upon him by the man he had till lately considered his dearest friend. At each bend of the footpath, as it threaded its way through the tortuous dell, following close the elbows of the bickering little stream, he expected to come full in sight of Nevitt. But, gaze as he would, no Nevitt appeared. He must have gone on, Guy thought, and come out at the other end, into the upland road, of which the porters at Mambury Station had told him.

At last he arrived at a delicious green nook, where the shade of the trees overhead was exceptionally dense, and where the ferns by the side were somewhat torn and trodden. Casting his eye on the ground to the left, a metal clasp, gleaming silvery among the bracken, happened to attract his cursory attention. Something about that clasp looked strangely familiar. He paused and stared hard at it. Surely, surely he had seen those metal knobs before. A flash of recognition ran electric through his brain. Why, yes; it was the fastener of Montague Nevitt’s pocket-book–the pocket-book in which he carried his most private documents; the pocket-book that must have held Cyril’s stolen six thousand. Guy stooped down to pick it up with a whirling sense of surprise. Great heavens! what was this? Not only the clasp, but the pocket-book itself–the pocket-book filled full and crammed to bursting with papers. Ah, mercy, what papers? Yes, incredible–the money! Hundred-pound notes! Not a doubt upon earth of it. The whole of the stolen and re-stolen three thousand.

For a minute or two Guy stood there, unable to believe his own swimming eyes. What on earth could have happened? Was it chance or design? Had Nevitt deliberately thrown away his ill-gotten gains? Were detectives on the track? Was he anxious to conceal his part in the theft? Had remorse got the better of him? Or was he frightened at last, thinking Guy was on his way to recover and restore Cyril’s stolen property?

But no, the pocket-book was neither hidden in the ferns nor yet studiously thrown away. From the place where it lay, Guy felt confident at once it had fallen unperceived from Nevitt’s pocket, and been trodden by his heel unawares into the yielding leaf-mould.

Had he pulled it out accidentally with his handkerchief? Very likely, Guy thought. But then, how strange and improbable that a man so methodical and calculating as Nevitt should carry such valuable belongings as those in the self-same pocket. It was certainly most singular. However, Guy congratulated himself, after a moment’s pause, that so much at least of the stolen property was duly recovered. He could pay back one-half of the purloined sum now to Cyril’s credit. So he went on his way through the rest of the wood in a somewhat calmer and easier frame of mind. To be sure, he had still to hunt down that villain Nevitt, and to tax him to his face with his double-dyed treachery. But it was something, nevertheless, to have recovered a part, at any rate, of the stolen money. And Nevitt himself need never know by what fortunate accident he had happened to recover it.

He emerged on the upland road, and struck back towards Mambury. All the way round, he never saw his man. Weary with walking, he returned in the end to the Talbot Arms. Had Mr. McGregor come back? No, not yet; but he was sure to be home for dinner. Then Guy would wait, and dine at the inn as well. He might have to stop all night, but he must see McGregor.

As the day wore on, however, it became gradually clear to him that Montague Nevitt didn’t mean to return at all. Hour after hour passed by, but nothing was heard of him. The landlord, good man, began to express his doubts and fears most freely. He hoped no harm hadn’t come to the gentleman in the parlour; he had a powerful zight o’ money on un for a man to carry about; the landlord had zeen it when he took out his book from his pocket to pay the porter. Volks didn’t ought to go about with two or dree hundred pound or more in the lonely lanes on the edge of the moorland.

But Guy, for his part, put a different interpretation on the affair at once. In some way or other Montague Nevitt, he thought, must have found out he was being tracked, and, fearing for his safety, must have dropped the pocket-book and made off, without note or notice given, on his own sound legs, for some other part of the country.

So Guy made up his mind to return next morning by the very first train direct to Plymouth, and there inquire once more whether anything further had been seen of the noticeable stranger.

CHAPTER XXIV.

A SLIGHT MISUNDERSTANDING.

On the very same day that Guy Waring visited Mambury, where his mother was married, Montague Nevitt had hunted up the entry of Colonel Kelmscott’s wedding in the church register.

Nevitt’s behaviour, to say the truth, wasn’t quite so black as Guy Waring painted it. He had gone off with the extra three thousand in his pocket, to be sure; but he didn’t intend to appropriate it outright to his own uses. He merely meant to give Guy a thoroughly good fright, as it wasn’t really necessary the call should be met for another fortnight; and then, as soon as he’d found out the truth about Colonel Kelmscott and his unacknowledged sons, he proposed to use his knowledge of the forgery as a lever with Guy, so as to force him to come to advantageous terms with his supposed father. Nevitt’s idea was that Guy and Cyril should drive a hard bargain on their own account with the Colonel, and that he himself should then receive a handsome commission on the transaction from both the brothers, under penalty of disclosing the true facts about the cheque by whose aid Guy had met their joint liability to the Rio Negro Diamond Mines.

It was with no small joy, therefore, that Nevitt saw at last in the parish register of St. Mary’s at Mambury, the interesting announcement, “June 27th, Henry Lucius Kelmscott, of the parish of Plymouth, bachelor, private in the Regiment of Scots Greys, to Lucy Waring, spinster, of this parish.”

He saw at a glance, of course, why Kelmscott of Tilgate had chosen to describe himself in this case as a private soldier. But he also saw that the entry was an official document, and that here he had one firm hold the more on Colonel Kelmscott, who must falsely have sworn to that incorrect description. The great point of all, however, was the signature to the book; and though nearly thirty years had elapsed since those words were written, it was clear to Nevitt, when he compared the autograph in the register with one of Colonel Kelmscott’s recent business letters, brought with him for the purpose, that both had been penned by one and the same person.

He chuckled to himself with delight to think how great a benefactor he had proved himself unawares to Guy and Cyril. At that very moment, no doubt, his misguided young friend whom he had compelled to assist him with the sinews of war for this important campaign was reviling and objurating him in revengeful terms as the blackest and most infamous of double-dyed traitors. Ah, well! ah, well! the good are inured to gross ingratitude. Guy little knew, as he, Montague Nevitt, stood there triumphant in the vestry, blandly rewarding the expectant clerk for his pains with a whole Bank of England five-pound note–the largest sum that functionary had ever in his life received all at once in a single payment–Guy little knew that Nevitt was really the chief friend and founder of the family fortunes, and was prepared to compel the “unknown benefactor” (for a moderate commission) to recognise his unacknowledged firstborn sons before all the world as the heirs to Tilgate. But yesterday, they were nameless waifs and strays, of uncertain origin, ashamed of their birth, and ignorant even whether they had been duly begotten in lawful wedlock; to-day, they were the legal inheritors of an honoured name and a great estate, the first and foremost among the landed gentry of a wealthy and beautiful English county.

He smiled to think what a good turn he had done unawares to those ungrateful youths–and how little credit, as yet, they were prepared to give him for it. In such a mood he returned to the inn to lunch. His spirits were high. This was a good day’s work, and he could afford, indeed, to make merry with his host over it. He ordered in a bottle of wine–such wine as the little country cellar could produce, and invited that honest man, the landlord, to step in and share it with him. He had tasted worse sherry on London dinner-tables, and he told his host so. An affable man with inferiors, Mr. Montague Nevitt! Then he strolled out by himself down the path by the brook. It was a pleasant walk, with the water making music in little trickles by its side, and Montague Nevitt, as a man of taste, found it suited exactly with his temper for the moment. He noted an undercurrent of rejoicing and triumphant cheeriness in the tone of the stream as it plashed among the pebbles on its precipitous bed that suggested to his mind some bars of a symphony which he determined to compose as soon as he got home again to his beloved fiddle.

So he walked along by himself, elate, and with a springy step, on thoughts of ambition intent, till he came at last to a cool and shadowy place, where as yet the ferns were NOT broken down and trampled underfoot, though Guy Waring found them so some twenty minutes later.

At that spot he looked up, and saw advancing along the path in the opposite direction the burly figure of a man, in a light tourist suit, whom he hadn’t yet observed since he came to Mambury. The very first point he noticed about the man, long before he recognised him, was a pair of overgrown, obtrusive hands held somewhat awkwardly in front of him–just like Gilbert Gildersleeve’s. The likeness, indeed, was so ridiculously close that Montague Nevitt smiled quietly to himself to observe it. If he’d been in the Tilgate district now, he’d have declared, without the slightest hesitation, that the man on the path WAS Gilbert Gildersleeve.

One second later, he pulled himself up with a jerk in alarmed surprise. “Great heavens” he cried to himself, a weird sense of awe creeping over him piece-meal, “either this is a dream or else it IS, it must be Gilbert Gildersleeve.”

And so, indeed, it was. Gilbert Gildersleeve himself, in his proper person. But the eminent Q.C., better versed in the wiles of time and place than Guy Waring in his innocence, had not come obtrusively to Mambury village or asked point-blank at the Talbot Arms by his own right name for the man he was in search of. Such simplicity of procedure would never even have occurred to that practised hand at the Old Bailey. Mr. Gilbert Gildersleeve appeared on that woodland path in the general guise of the common pedestrian tourist with his head-quarters at Ivybridge, walking about on the congenial outskirts of the Moor in search of the picturesque, and coming and going by mere accident through Mambury. He had hovered around the neighbourhood for two days, off and on, in search of his man; and now, by careful watching, like an amateur detective, he had run his prey to earth by a dexterous flank-movement and secured an interview with him where he couldn’t shirk or avoid it.

To Montague Nevitt, however, the meeting seemed at first sight but the purest accident. He had no reason to suppose, indeed, that Gilbert Gildersleeve had any special interest in his visit to Mambury, further than might be implied in its possible connection with Granville Kelmscott’s affairs; and he didn’t believe Gwendoline, in her fear of her father, that blustering man, would ever have communicated to him the personal facts of their interview at Tilgate. So he advanced to meet his old acquaintance, the barrister, with frankly outstretched hand.

“Mr. Gildersleeve!” he exclaimed in some surprise. “No, it can’t be you. Well, this IS indeed an unexpected pleasure.”

Gilbert Gildersleeve gazed down upon him from the towering elevation of his six feet four. Montague Nevitt was tall enough, as men go in England, but with his slim, tailor-made form, and his waxed moustaches, he looked by the side of that big-built giant, like a: Bond Street exquisite before some prize-fighting Goliath. The barrister didn’t hold out his huge hand in return. On the contrary, he concealed it, as far as was possible, behind his burly back, and, looking down from the full height of his contempt upon the sinister smirking creature who advanced to greet him with that false smile on his face, he asked severely,

“What are YOU doing here? That’s what _I_ have to ask. What foxy ferreting have you come down to Mambury for?”

“Foxy ferreting,” Montague Nevitt repeated, drawing back as if stung, and profoundly astonished. “Why, what do you mean by that, Mr. Gildersleeve? I don’t understand you.” The home-thrust was too true–after the great cross-examiner’s well-known bullying manner –not to pierce him to the quick. “Who dares to say I go anywhere ferreting?”

“_I_ do,” Gilbert Gildersleeve answered, with assured confidence. “I say it, and I know it. You pitiful sneak, don’t deny it to ME. You were in the vestry this morning looking up the registers. Even YOU, with your false eyes, sir, daren’t look me in the face and tell me you weren’t. I saw you there myself. And I know you found in the books what you wanted; for you paid the clerk an extravagant fee. … What’s that? you rat, don’t try to interrupt me. Don’t try to bully me. It never succeeds. Montague Nevitt, I tell you, I WON’T be bullied.” And the great Q.C. put his foot down on the path with an elephantine solidity that made the prospect of bullying him seem tolerably unlikely. “I know the facts, and I’ll stand no prevarication. Now, tell me, what vile use did you mean to make of your discovery this morning?”

Montague Nevitt drew back, fairly nonplussed for the moment by such a vigorous and unexpected attack on his flank. Resourceful as he was, even his cunning mind came wholly unprepared to this sudden cross-questioning. He felt his own physical inferiority to the big Q.C. more keenly just then than he could ever have conceived it possible for a man of his type to feel it. After all, mind doesn’t always triumph over matter. Montague Nevitt was aware that that mountain of a man, with his six feet four of muscular humanity, fairly cowed and overawed him at such very close quarters.

“I don’t see what business it is of yours, Mr. Gildersleeve,” he murmured, in a somewhat apologetic voice. “I may surely be allowed to hunt up questions of pedigree, of service in the end to myself and my friends, without YOUR interference.”

Gilbert Gildersleeve glared at him, and flared up all at once with righteous indignation.

“Of service in the end to yourself and your friends!” he cried, with unfeigned scorn, putting his own interpretation, as was natural, on the words. “Why, you cur! you reptile! you unblushing sneak! Do you mean to say openly you avow your intention of threatening and blackmailing me? here–alone–to my face! You extortionate wretch! I wouldn’t have believed even YOU in your heart would descend to such meanness.”

Montague Nevitt, flurried and taken aback as he was, yet reflected vaguely with some wonder, as he listened and looked, what this sudden passion of disinterested zeal could betoken. Why such burning solicitude for Colonel Kelmscott’s estate on the part of a man who was his avowed enemy? Even if Gwendoline meant to marry the young fellow Granville, with her father’s consent, how could Nevitt himself levy blackmail upon Gilbert Gildersleeve by his knowledge of the two Warings’ claim to the property? A complication surely. Was there not some unexpected intricacy here which the cunning schemer himself didn’t yet understand, but which might redound, if unravelled, to his greater advantage?

“Blackmail YOU, Mr. Gildersleeve,” he cried, with a righteously indignant air. “That’s an ugly word. I blackmail nobody; and least of all the father of a lady whom I still regard, in spite of all she can say or do to make my life a blank, with affection and respect as profound as ever. How can my inquiries into the two Warings’ affairs–“

Gilbert Gildersleeve crushed him with a sudden outburst of indignant wrath.