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 bed, 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."