Strangely enough, moreover, the subject that seemed most to occupy Guy Waring"s mind, on the voyage home, was not his forthcoming trial on a capital charge, but the future distribution of the Tilgate property. Was he essentially a money-grubber, Granville wondered to himself, as he had thought him at first in the diamond fields in Barolong land? Was he incapable of thinking about anything but filthy lucre? No; that was clearly not the true solution of the problem, for, whenever Guy spoke to him about the subject, it was generally to say one and the self-same thing--
"In this matter, I feel I can speak for Cyril as I speak for myself.
Neither of us would wish to deprive you now of what you"ve always been brought up to consider as your own. Neither of us would wish to dispossess Lady Emily. The most we would desire is this--to have our position openly acknowledged and settled before the world. We should like it to be known we were the lawful sons of a brave man and an honest woman. And if you wish voluntarily to share with us some part of our father"s estate, we"ll be willing to enter into a reasonable arrangement by which yon yourself can retain Tilgate Park and the ma.s.s of the property that immediately appertains to it. I"m sure Cyril would no more wish to be grasping in this matter than I am; and after all that you and I have gone through together, Granville, I don"t think yon need doubt the sincerity of my feelings towards you."
He spoke so sensibly, he spoke so manfully, he spoke so kindly always, with a bright gleam in those tender eyes, that Granville hardly knew what to make of his evident confidence. Surely a man couldn"t be mad who could speak like that; and yet, whenever he alluded in any way to his return to England, it was always as though he ignored the gravity and heinousness of the charge brought against him. It was as though murder was an accident, for which one was hardly responsible. Granville couldn"t make him out at all; the fellow was an enigma to him. There was so much that was good in him; and yet, there must be so much that was bad as well. He was such a delicate, considerate, self-effacing gentleman--and yet, if one could believe what he himself more than once as good as admitted, he was a criminal, a felon, an open murderer.
Still, even so, Granville couldn"t turn his back upon the brother who had seen him so bravely across the terrors of Namaqua land. He thought of how he had misjudged him once before, and how much he had repented it. Whether Guy was a murderer or not, Granville felt, the man he had saved, at least, could never forsake him.
The night before their arrival at Plymouth, Guy was in unusually high spirits. His mirth was contagious. Everybody on board was delighted at the prospect of reaching land, but Guy was more delighted and more sanguine than anybody. He was sure in his own mind this difficulty must have blown over long before now; Cyril must have explained; Nevitt must have confessed; everything must have been set right, and his own good name satisfactorily rehabilitated.
For more than eighteen months he had heard nothing from England.
To-morrow he would see Cyril, and account for everything. He had money to set all right--his hard-earned money, got at the risk of his own life in the dreary deserts of Barolong land. All would yet be well, and Cyril would marry, and Elma Clifford would be the mistress of nearly half the Tilgate property.
"It was all so different, Granville," he said to his friend confidentially, as they paced the deck after supper, cigar in mouth, "when you first went out, and we didn"t know one another.
Then, I distrusted you, and you distrusted me. We didn"t understand one another"s characters. But now we can settle it all as a family affair. Men who have camped out together under the open sky on the African veldt, who have run the gauntlet of Korannas and Barolong and Namaqua, who have stood by one another in sickness and in fight, needn"t be afraid of disagreeing about their money matters in England. Cyril will meet us to-morrow and talk it all over, and I"m not the least troubled about the result, either for you or for him. The same blood runs in all our veins alike. Whatever you propose, he"ll be ready to agree to. He"s the very best fellow that ever lived, and when he hears what I have to say about you, he"ll welcome you as a brother, and be as fond of you as I am."
Next morning early they reached Plymouth Harbour. As they entered the mouth of the breakwater, the tender came alongside to convey them ash.o.r.e. Guy looked over the bulwarks and saw Cyril waiting for him. In a fervour of delight at the sight of the green fields and the soft hills of old England--the beautiful Hoe, and the solid stone houses, and the familiar face turned up to welcome him--Guy waved his handkerchief round and round his head in triumph; to which demonstration Cyril, as he fancied, responded but coldly. A chill fell upon his heart. This was bad, but still, after all, he could hardly expect Cyril to know intuitively under what sinister influence he had signed that fatal cheque. And yet he was disappointed.
His heart had jumped so hard at sight of Cyril, he could hardly believe Cyril wasn"t glad to see him.
As he stepped into the tender from the gangway, just ready to rush up and shake Cyril"s hand fervently, a resolute-looking man by the side of the steps laid a very firm grip on his shoulder with an air of authority.
"Guy Waring?" he said interrogatively.
And Guy, turning pale, answered without flinching--
"Yes, my name"s Guy Waring."
"Then you"re my prisoner," the man said, in a very firm voice. "I"m an inspector of constabulary."
"On what charge?" Guy exclaimed, half taken aback at this prompt.i.tude.
"I have a warrant against you, sir," the inspector answered, "as you are no doubt aware, for the wilful murder of Montague Nevitt, on the 17th of August, year before last, at Mambury, in Devonshire."
The word"s fell upon Guy"s ears with all the suddenness and crushing force of an unexpected thunderbolt.
"Wilful murder," he cried, taken aback by the charge. "Wilful murder of Montague Nevitt at Mambury! Oh no, you can"t mean that!
Montague Nevitt dead! Montague Nevitt murdered! And at Mambury, too! There MUST be some mistake somewhere."
"No, there"s no mistake at all, this time," the inspector said quietly, slipping a pair of handcuffs un.o.btrusively into his pocket as he spoke. "If you come along with me without any unnecessary noise, we won"t trouble to iron you. But you"d better say as little as possible about the charge just now, for whatever you say may be used in evidence at the trial against you."
Guy turned to Cyril with an appealing look. "Cyril," he, cried, "what does all this mean? Is Nevitt dead? It"s the very first word I"ve ever heard about it."
Cyril"s heart gave a bound of wild relief at those words. The moment Guy said it his brother knew he spoke the simple truth.
"Why, Guy," he answered, with a fierce burst of joy, "then you"re not a murderer after all? You"re innocent! You"re innocent! And for eighteen months all England has thought you guilty; and I"ve lived under the burden of being universally considered a murderer"s brother!"
Guy looked him back in the face with those truthful grey eyes of his.
"Cyril," he said solemnly, "I"m as innocent of this charge as you or Granville Kelmscott here. I never even heard one whisper of it before. I don"t know what it means. I don"t know who they want. Till this moment I thought Montague Nevitt was still alive in England."
And as he said it, Granville Kelmscott, too, saw he was speaking the truth. Impossible as he found it in his own mind to reconcile those strange words with all that Guy had said to him in the wilds of Namaqua land, he couldn"t look him in the face without seeing at a glance how profound and unexpected was this sudden surprise to him. He was right in saying, "I"m as innocent of this charge as you or Granville Kelmscott."
But the inspector only smiled a cynical smile, and answered calmly--
"That"s for the jury to decide. We shall hear more of this then.
You"ll be tried at the a.s.sizes. Meanwhile, the less said, the sooner mended."
CHAPTER XLI.
WHAT JUDGE?
For many days, meanwhile, Sir Gilbert had hovered between life and death, and Elma had watched his illness daily with profound and absorbing interest. For in her deep, intuitive way she felt certain to herself that their one chance now lay in Sir Gilbert"s own sense of remorse and repentance. She didn"t yet know, to be sure--what Sir Gilbert himself knew--that if he recovered he would, in all probability, have to sit in trial on another man for the crime he had himself committed. But she did feel this,--that Sir Gilbert would surely never stand by and let an innocent man die for his own transgression.
IF he recovered, that was to say. But perhaps he would not recover.
Perhaps his life would flicker out by degrees in the midst of his delirium, and he would go to his grave unconfessed and unforgiven!
Perhaps even, for his wife"s and daughter"s sake, he would shrink from revealing what Elma felt to be the truth, and would rest content to die, leaving Guy Waring to clear himself at the trial, as best he might, from this hateful accusation.
It would be unjust. It would be criminal. Yet Sir Gilbert might do it.
Elma had a bad time, therefore, during all those long days, even before Guy returned to England. She knew his life hung by a slender thread, which Sir Gilbert Gildersleeve might cut short at any moment. But her anxiety was as nothing compared to Sir Gilbert"s own. That unhappy man, a moral coward at heart, in spite of all his bl.u.s.tering, lay writhing in his own room now, very ill, and longing to be worse, longing to die, as the easiest way out of this impossible difficulty. For his wife"s sake, for Gwendoline"s sake, it was better he should die; and if only he could, he would have left Guy Waring to his fate contentedly. His anger against Guy burnt so bright now at last that he would have sacrificed him willingly, provided he was not there himself to see and know it.
What did the man mean by living on to vex him? Over and over again the unhappy judge wished himself dead, and prayed to be taken. But that powerful frame, though severely broken by the shock, seemed hardly able to yield up its life merely because its owner was anxious to part with it.
After a fortnight"s severe illness, hovering all the time between hope and fear, the doctor came one day, and looked at him hard.
"How is he?" Lady Gildersleeve asked, seeing him hold his breath and consider.
To her great surprise the doctor answered, "Better; against all hope, better." And indeed Sir Gilbert was once more convalescent.
A week or two abroad, it was said, would restore him completely.
Then Elma had another terrible source of doubt. Would the doctors order Sir Gilbert abroad so long that he would be out of England when the trial took place? If so, he might miss many p.r.i.c.ks of remorse. She must take some active steps to arouse his conscience.
Sir Gilbert, himself, now recovering fast, fought hard, as well he might, for such leave of absence. He was quite unfit, he said, to return to his judicial work so soon. Though he had said nothing about it in public before (this was the tenor of his talk) he was a man of profound but restrained feelings, and he had felt, he would admit, the absence of Gwendoline"s lover--especially when combined with the tragic death of Colonel Kelmscott, the father, and the memory of the unpleasantness that had once subsisted, through the Colonel"s blind obstinacy, between the two houses. This sudden news of the young man"s return had given him a nervous shock of which few would have believed him capable. "You wouldn"t think to look at me," Sir Gilbert said plaintively, smoothing down his bedclothes with those elephantine hands of his, "I was the sort of man to be knocked down in this way;" and the great specialist from London, gazing at him with a smile, admitted to himself that he certainly would not have thought it.
"Oh, nonsense, my dear sir," the specialist answered, however, to all his appeals. "This is the merest pa.s.sing turn, I a.s.sure you.
I couldn"t conscientiously say you"d be unfit for duty by the time the a.s.sizes come round again. It"s clear to me, on the contrary, with a physique like yours, you"ll pull yourself together in something less than no time with a week or so at Spa. Before you"re due in England to take up harness again you"ll be walking miles at a stretch over those heathery hills there. Convalescence, with a man like you, is a rapid process. In a fortnight from to-day, I"ll venture to guarantee, you"ll be in a fit condition to swim the Channel on your back, or to take one of your famous fifty-mile tramps across the bogs of Dartmoor. I"ll give you a tonic that"ll set your nerves all right at once. You"ll come back from Spa as fresh as a daisy."
To Spa, accordingly, Sir Gilbert went; and from Spa came trembling letters now and again between Gwendoline and Elma. Gwendoline was very anxious papa should get well soon, she said, for she wanted to be home before the Cape steamer arrived. "You know why, Elma."
But Sir Gilbert didn"t return before Guy"s arrival in England, for all that. The papers continued to give bulletins of his health, and to speculate on the probability of his returning in time to do the Western Circuit. Elma remained in a fever of doubt and anxiety.
To her, much depended now on the question of Sir Gilbert"s presence or absence. For if he was indeed to try the case, she felt certain to herself, it must work upon his remorse and compel confession.
Meanwhile, preparations went on in England for Guy"s approaching trial. The magistrates committed; the grand jury, of course, found a true bill; all England rang with the strange news that the man Guy Waring, the murderer of Mr. Montague Nevitt some eighteen months before, had returned at last of his own free will, and had given himself up to take his trial. Gildersleeve was to be the judge, they said; or if he were too ill, Atkins. Atkins was as sure as a gun to hang him, people thought--that was Atkins"s way--and, besides, the evidence against the man, though in a sense circ.u.mstantial, was so absolutely overwhelming that acquittal seemed impossible.
Five to two was freely offered on Change that they"d hang him.
The case was down for first hearing at the a.s.sizes. The night before the trial Elma Clifford, who had hurried to Devonshire with her mother to see and hear all--she couldn"t help it, she said; she felt she MUST be present--Elma Clifford looked at the evening paper with a sickening sense of suspense and anxiety. A paragraph caught her eye: "We understand that, after all, Mr. Justice Gildersleeve still finds himself too unwell to return to England for the Western a.s.sizes, and his place will, therefore, most probably be taken by Mr. Justice Atkins. The calendar is a heavy one, and includes the interesting case of Mr. Guy Waring, charged with the wilful murder of Montague Nevitt, at Mambury, in Devonshire."