"You cashed that cheque yourself, sir, over the counter, you remember," the cashier said quietly, "on the date it was drawn on."
Cyril never altered a muscle of his rigid face.
"Ah, quite so," he answered, in a very dry voice, not daring to contradict the man. He knew just what had happened. Guy must have come to get the money himself, and the cashier must have mistaken him for the proper owner of the purloined six thousand. They were so very much alike. n.o.body ever distinguished them.
"And that was one of the days, I think, when you proved the alibi in Belgium before the Devonshire magistrates at Tavistock yesterday,"
the clerk went on, with a searching glance. Cyril started this time. He saw in a second the new danger thus sprung upon him. If the cashier chose to press the matter home to the hilt, he must necessarily arrive at one or other of two results. Either the alibi would break down altogether, or it would be perfectly clear that Guy had committed a forgery.
"So it seems," he answered, looking his keen interlocutor straight in the eyes. "So it seems, I should say, by the date on the face of it."
But the cashier did NOT care to press the matter home any further; and for a very good reason. It was none of his business to suggest the idea of a forgery, after a cheque had been presented and duly cashed, if the customer to whose account it was debited in course chose voluntarily to accept the responsibility of honouring it.
The objection should come first from the customer"s side. If HE didn"t care to press it, then neither did the cashier. Why should he, indeed? Why saddle his firm with six thousand pounds loss? He would only get himself into trouble for having failed to observe the discrepancy in the signatures, and the difference between the brothers. That, after all, is what a cashier is for. If he doesn"t fulfil those first duties of his post, why what on earth can be the good of him to anybody in any way?
The two men looked at one another across the counter with a strong inscrutable stare of mutual suspicion. Then Cyril slowly tore up the cheque he had tendered for fifty pounds, filled in another for his real balance of twenty-two, handed it across to the clerk without another word, received the cash in white trembling hands, and went out to his cab again in a turmoil of excitement.
All the way back to his rooms in Staple Inn one seething idea alone possessed his soul. His faith in Guy was beginning to break down.
And with it, his faith in himself almost went. The man was his own brother--his very counterpart, he knew; could he really believe him capable of committing a murder? Cyril looked within, and said a thousand times NO; he looked at that forged cheque, and his heart misgave him.
At Staple Inn, the housekeeper who took care of their joint rooms came out to greet him with no small store of tears and lamentations.
"Oh, Mr. Cyril," she cried, seizing both his hands in hers with a tremulous welcome, "I"m glad to see you back, and to know you"re innocent. I always said you never could have done it; no, no, not you, nor yet Mr. Guy neither. The police has been here time and again to search the rooms, but, the Lord be praised, they never found anything. And I"ve got a letter for you, too, from Mr. Guy himself; but there--I locked it up till you come in my own cupboard at home, for fear of the detectives; and now you"re back and safe in London again, I"ll run home this minute round the corner and get it."
Cyril sat down in the familiar easy-chair, holding his face in his hands, and gazed about him blankly. Such a home-coming as this was inexpressibly terrible to him.
In a few minutes more the housekeeper came back, bringing in her hand Guy"s letter from Plymouth.
Cyril sat for a minute and looked at the envelope in deadly silence.
Then he motioned the housekeeper out of the room with one quivering hand. Before that good woman"s face, he couldn"t open it and read it.
As soon as she was gone, he tore it apart, trembling. As he read and read the suspicion within him deepened quickly into a doubt, the doubt into a conviction, the conviction into a certainty. He clapped his hands to his head. Oh, G.o.d, what was this? Guy acknowledged his own guilt! He confessed he had done it!
Cyril"s last hope was gone. Guy himself admitted it!
"How I came to do it," the letter said, "I"ve no idea myself. A sudden suggestion--a strange, unaccountable impulse--a prompting, as it were, pressed upon me from without, and almost before I knew, the crime was committed."
Cyril bent his head low upon his knees with shame. He never could hold up that head henceforth. No further doubt or hesitation remained. He knew the whole truth. Guy was indeed a murderer.
He steeled himself for the worst, and read the letter through with a superhuman effort. It almost choked him to read. The very consecutiveness and coherency of the sentences seemed all but incredible under such awful circ.u.mstances. A murderer, red-handed, to speak of his crime so calmly as that! And then, too, this undying anger expressed and felt, even after death, against his victim Nevitt! Cyril couldn"t understand how any man--least of all his own brother--could write such words about the murdered man whose body was then lying all silent and cold, under the open sky, among the bracken at Mambury.
And once more, this awful clue of the dead man"s pocket-book! Those accursed notes! That hateful sum of money! How could Guy venture to speak of it all in such terms as those--the one palpable fact that indubitably linked him with that cold-blooded murder. "The three thousand sent herewith I recovered, almost by a miracle, from that false creature"s grasp, under extraordinary circ.u.mstances, and I return them now, in proof of the fact, in Montague Nevitt"s own pocket-book, which I"m sure you"ll recognise as soon as you look at it."
Cyril saw it all now beyond the shadow of a doubt. He reconstructed the whole sad tale. He was sure he understood it. But to understand it was hardly even yet to believe it. Guy had lost heavily in the Rio Negro Mines, as the prosecution declared; in an evil hour he"d been cajoled into forging Cyril"s name for six thousand. Montague Nevitt had in some way misappropriated the stolen sum. Guy had pursued him in a sudden white-heat of fury, had come up with him unawares, had killed him in his rage, and now calmly returned as much as he could recover of that fateful and twice-stolen money to Cyril. It was all too horrible, but all too true. In a wild ferment of remorse for his brother"s sin, the unhappy painter sat down at once and penned a letter of abject self-humiliation to Elma Clifford.
"ELMA,-I said to you last night that I could never marry you till I had clearly proved my brother Guy"s innocence. Well, I said what I can never conceivably do. Since returning to town I received a letter from Guy himself. What it contained I must never tell you, for Guy"s own sake. But what I MUST tell you is this--I can never again see you. Guy and I are so nearly one, in every nerve and fibre of our being, that whatever he may have done is to me almost as if I myself had done it. You will know how terrible a thing it is for me to write these words, but for YOUR sake I can"t refrain from writing them. Think no more of me. I am not worthy of you.
I will think of you as long as I live.
"Your ever devoted and heart-broken
"CYRIL."
He folded the letter, and sent it off to the temporary address at the West-End where Elma had told him that she and her mother would spend the night in London. Very late that evening a ring came at the bell. Cyril ran to the door. It was a boy with a telegram. He opened it, and read it with breathless excitement.
"Whatever Guy may have said, you are quite mistaken. There"s a mystery somewhere. Keep his letter and show it to me. I may, perhaps, be able to unravel the tangle. I"m more than ever convinced that what I said to you last night was perfectly true. We will save him yet. Unalterably,
"ELMA."
But the telegram brought little peace to Cyril. Of what value were Elma"s vague intuitions now, by the side of Guy"s own positive confession? With his very own hand Guy admitted that he had done it. Cyril went to bed that night, the unhappiest, loneliest man in London. What Guy was, he was. He felt himself almost like the actual murderer.
CHAPTER x.x.xI.
"GOLDEN JOYS."
The voyage to the Cape was long and tedious. On the whole way out, Guy made but few friends, and talked very little to his fellow pa.s.sengers. That unhappy recognition by Granville Kelmscott the evening he went on board the Cetewayo poisoned the fugitive"s mind for the entire pa.s.sage. He felt himself, in fact, a moral outcast; he slunk away from his kind; he hardly dared to meet Kelmscott"s eyes for shame, whenever he pa.s.sed him. But for one thing at least he was truly grateful. Though Kelmscott had evidently discovered from the papers the nature of Guy"s crime, and knew his real name well, it was clear he had said nothing of any sort on the subject to the other pa.s.sengers. Only one man on board was aware of his guilt, Guy believed, and that one man he shunned accordingly as far as was possible within the narrow limits of the saloon and the quarter-deck.
Granville Kelmscott, of course, took a very different view of Guy Waring"s position. He had read in the paper he bought at Plymouth that Guy was the murderer of Montague Nevitt. Regarding him, therefore, as a criminal of the deepest dye now flying from justice, he wasn"t at all surprised at Guy"s shrinking and shunning him; what astonished him rather was the man"s occasional and incredible fits of effrontery. How that fellow could ever laugh and talk at all among the ladies on deck--with the hangman at his back--simply appalled and horrified the proud soul of a Kelmscott. Granville had hard work to keep from expressing his horror openly at times.
But still, with an effort, he kept his peace. With the picture of his father and Lady Emily now strong before his mind, he couldn"t find it in his heart to bring his own half-brother, however guilty and criminal the man might be, to the foot of the gallows.
So they voyaged on together without once interchanging a single word, all the way from Plymouth to the Cape Colony. And the day they landed at Port Elizabeth, it was an infinite relief indeed to Guy to think he could now get well away for ever from that fellow Kelmscott. Not being by any means over-burdened with ready cash, however, Guy determined to waste no time in the coastwise towns, but to make his way at once boldly up country towards Kimberley.
The railway ran then only as far as Grahamstown; the rest of his journey to the South African Golconda was accomplished by road, in a two-wheeled cart, drawn by four small horses, which rattled along with a will, up hill and down dale, over the precarious highways of that semi-civilized upland.
To Guy, just fresh from England and the monotonous sea, there was a certain exhilaration in this first hasty glimpse of the infinite luxuriance of sub-tropical nature. At times he almost forgot Montague Nevitt and the forgery in the boundless sense of freedom and novelty given him by those vast wastes of rolling tableland, thickly covered with gra.s.s or low th.o.r.n.y acacias, and stretching illimitably away in low range after range to the blue mountains in the distance. It was strange indeed to him on the wide plains through which they scurried in wild haste to see the springbok rush away from the doubtful track at the first whirr of their wheels, or the bolder bustard stand and gaze among the long gra.s.s, with his wary eye turned sideways to look at them. Guy felt for the moment he had left Europe and its reminiscences now fairly behind him; in this free new world, he was free once more himself; his shame was cast aside; he could revel like the antelopes in the immensity of a land where n.o.body knew him and he knew n.o.body.
What added most of all, however, to this quaint new sense of vastness and freedom was the occasional appearance of naked blacks, roaming at large through the burnt-up fields of which till lately they had been undisputed possessors. Day after day Guy drove on along the uncertain roads, past queer outlying towns of white wooden houses--Cradock, and Middelburg, and Colesberg, and others--till they crossed at last the boundary of Orange River into the Free State, and halted for a while in the main street of Philippolis.
It was a dreary place; Guy began now to see the other side of South Africa. Though he had left England in autumn, it was spring-time at the Cape, and the winter drought had parched up all the gra.s.s, leaving the bare red dust in the roads or streets as dry and desolate as the sand of the desert. The town itself consisted of some sixty melancholy and distressful houses, bare, square, and flat-roofed, standing unenclosed along a dismal high-road, and with that congenitally shabby look, in spite of their newness, which seems to belong by nature to all southern buildings. Some stagnant pools alone remained to attest the presence after rain of a roaring brook, the pits in whose dried-up channel they now occupied; over their tops hung the faded foliage of a few dust-laden trees, struggling hard for life with the energy of despair against depressing circ.u.mstances. It was a picture that gave Guy a sudden attack of pessimism; if THIS was the El Dorado towards which he was going, he earnestly wished himself back again once more, forgery or no forgery, among the breezy green fields of dear old England.
On to Fauresmith he travelled with less comfort than before in a rickety buggy of most primitive construction, designed to meet the needs of rough mountain roads, and as innocent of springs as Guy himself of the murder of Montague Nevitt. It was a wretched drive. The drought had now broken; the wet season had begun; rain fell heavily. A piercing cold wind blew down from the nearer mountains; and Guy began to feel still more acutely than ever that South Africa was by no means an earthly paradise. As he drove on and on this feeling deepened upon him. Huge blocks of stone obstructed the rough road, intersected as it was by deep cart-wheel ruts, down which the rain-water now flowed in impromptu torrents. The Dutch driver, too, anxious to show the mettle of his coa.r.s.e-limbed steeds, persisted in dashing over the hummocky ground at a break-neck pace, while Guy balanced himself with difficulty on the narrow seat, hanging on to his portmanteau for dear life among the jerks and jolts, till his ringers were numbed with cold and exposure.
They held out against it all, before the pelting rain, till man and beast were well-nigh exhausted. At last, about three-quarters of the way to Fauresmith, on the bleak bare hill-tops, sleety snow began to fall in big flakes, and the barking of a dog to be heard in the distance. The Boer driver p.r.i.c.ked up his ears at the sound.
"That must a house be," he remarked in his Dutch pigeon-English to Guy; and Guy felt in his soul that the most miserable and filthy of Kaffir huts would just then be a welcome sight to his weary eyes.
He would have given a sovereign, indeed, from the scanty store he possessed, for a night"s lodging in a convenient dog-kennel. He was agreeably surprised, therefore, to find it was a comfortable farmhouse, where the lights in the cas.e.m.e.nt beamed forth a cheery welcome on the wet and draggled wayfarers from real gla.s.s windows.
The farmer within received them hospitably. Business was brisk to-day.
Another traveller, he said, had just gone on towards Fauresmith.
"A young man like yourself, fresh from England," the farmer observed, scanning Guy closely. "He"s off for the diamond diggings. I think to Dutoitspan."
Guy rested the right there, thinking nothing of the stranger, and went on next day more quietly to Fauresmith. Thence to the diamond fields, the country became at each step more sombre and more monotonous than ever. In the afternoon they rested at Jacobsdal, another dusty, dreary, comfortless place, consisting of about five and twenty bankrupt houses scattered in bare clumps over a scorched-up desert. Then on again next day, over a drearier and ever drearier expanse of landscape. It was ghastly. It was horrible. At last, on the top of a dismal hill range, looking down on a deep dale, the driver halted. In the vast flat below, a dull dense fog seemed to envelop the world with inscrutable mists. The driver pointed to it with his demonstrative whip.
"Down yonder," he said encouragingly, as he put the skid on his wheel, "down yonder"s the diamond fields--that"s Dutoitspan before you."
"What makes it so grey?" Guy asked, looking in front of him with a sinking heart. This first view of his future home was by no means encouraging.
"Oh, the sand make it be like that," the driver answered unconcernedly.
"Diamond fields all make up of fine red sand; and diggers pile it about around their own claims. Then the wind comes and blow, and make sandstorm always around Dutoitspan."