"Is Billington," Guy answered, with a faint tremor of shame at the continued falsehood.
The man who had bought the paper turned round sharply and stared at him. Their eyes met in one quick flash of unexpected recognition. Guy started in horror. This was an awful meeting. He had seen the man but once before in his life, yet he knew him at a glance. It was Granville Kelmscott.
For a minute or two they stood and stared at one another blankly, those unacknowledged half-brothers, of whom one now knew, while the other still ignored, the real relationship that existed between them. Then Granville Kelmscott turned away without one word of greeting. Guy trembled in his shame. He knew he was discovered. But before his very eyes, Granville took the paper he had been reading by that uncertain light, and, raising it high in his hand, flung it over into the sea with spasmodic energy. It was the special edition containing the account of the man McGregor's death and Guy Waring's supposed connection with the murder. Granville Kelmscott, indeed, couldn't bring himself to denounce his own half-brother. He stared at him coldly for a second with a horrified face.
Then he said, in a very low and distant voice, "I know your identity, Mr. Billington," with a profoundly sarcastic accent on the assumed name, "and I will not betray it. I know your secret, too; and I will keep that inviolate. Only, during the rest of this voyage, do me the honour, I beg of you, not to recognise me or speak to me in any way at any time."
Guy slunk away in silence to his own cabin. Never before in his life had he known such shame. He felt that his punishment was indeed too heavy for him.
CHAPTER XXVII.
SOMETHING TO THEIR ADVANTAGE
At Tilgate and Chetwood next morning, two distinguished households were thrown into confusion by the news in the papers. To Colonel Kelmscott and to Elma Clifford alike that news came with crushing force and horror. A murder, said the Times, had been committed in Devonshire, in a romantic dell, on the skirts of Dartmoor. No element of dramatic interest was wanting to the case; persons, place, and time were all equally remarkable. The victim of the outrage was Mr. Montague Nevitt, confidential clerk to Messrs. Drummond, Coutts, and Barclay, the well-known bankers, and himself a familiar figure in musical society in London. The murderer was presumably a young journalist, Mr. Guy Waring, not unknown himself in musical circles, and brother of that rising landscape painter, Mr. Cyril Waring, whose pictures of wild life in forest scenery had lately attracted considerable attention at the Academy and the Grosvenor. Mr. Guy Waring had been arrested the day before on the pier at Dover, where he had just arrived by the Ostend packet. It was supposed by the police that he had hastily crossed the Channel from Plymouth to Cherbourg, soon after the murder, to escape detection, and, after journeying by cross-country routes through France and Belgium, had returned via Ostend to the shores of England. It was a triumphant vindication of our much maligned detective system that within a few hours after the discovery of the body on Dartmoor, the supposed criminal should have been recognised, arrested, and detained among a thousand others, in a busy port, at the very opposite extremity of southern England.
Colonel Kelmscott that day was strangely touched, even before he took up his morning paper. A letter from Granville, posted at Plymouth, had just reached him by the early mail, to tell him that the only son he had ever really loved or cared for on earth had sailed the day before, a disinherited outcast, to seek his fortune in the wild wastes of Africa. How he could break the news to Lady Emily he couldn't imagine. The Colonel, twisting his white moustache, with a quivering hand on his tremulous lip, hardly dared to realize what their future would seem like. And then—he turned to the paper, and saw to his horror this awful tale of a cold-blooded and cowardly murder, committed on a friend by one who, however little he might choose to acknowledge it, was after all his own eldest son, a Kelmscott of Tilgate, as much as Granville himself, in lawful wedlock duly begotten.
The proud but broken man gazed at the deadly announcement in blank amaze and agony. His Nemesis had come. Guy Waring was his own son—and Guy Waring was a murderer.
He tried to argue with himself at first that this tragic result in some strange way justified him, after the event, for his own long neglect of his parental responsibilities. The young man was no true Kelmscott at heart, he was sure, or such an act as that would have revolted and appalled him. He was no true son in reality; his order disowned him. Base blood flowed in his veins, and made crimes like these conceivable.
"I was right after all," the Colonel thought, "not to acknowledge these half low-born lads as the heirs of Tilgate. Bad blood will out in the end—and THIS is the result of it."
And then, with sudden revulsion he thought once more—God help him! How could he say such things in his heart even now of HER, his pure, trustful Lucy? She was better than him in her soul, he knew—ten thousand times better. If bad blood came in anywhere, it came in from himself, not from that simple-hearted, innocent little country-bred angel.
And perhaps if he'd treated these lads as he ought, and brought them up to their own, and made them Kelmscotts indeed, instead of nameless adventurers, they might never have fallen into such abysses of turpitude. But he had let them grow up in ignorance of their own origin, with the vague stain of a possible illegitimacy hanging over their heads; and what wonder if they forgot in the end how noblesse oblige, and sank at last into foul depths of vice and criminality?
As he read on, his head swam with the cumulative evidence of that deliberately planned and cruelly executed yet brutal murder. The details of the crime gave him a sickening sense of loathing and incredulity. Impossible that his own son could have schemed and carried out so vile an attack upon a helpless person, who had once been his nearest and dearest companion. And yet, the account in the paper gave him no alternative but to believe it. Nevitt and Guy Waring had been inseparable friends. They had dined together, supped together, played duets in their own rooms, gone out to the same parties, belonged to the same club, in all things been closer than even the two twin brothers. Some quarrel seemed to have arisen about a matter of speculations in which both had suffered. They separated at once—separated in anger. Nevitt went down to Devonshire by himself for his holiday. Then Waring followed him, without any pretence at concealment; inquired for him at the village inn with expressions of deadly hate; tracked him to a lonely place in the adjacent wood; choked him, apparently with some form of garotte or twisted rope—for the injuries seemed greater than even the most powerful man could possibly inflict with the hands alone; and hid the body of his murdered friend at last in a mossy dell by the bank of the streamlet. Nor was that all; for with callous effrontery he had returned to the inn, still inquiring after his victim; and had gone off next morning early with a lie on his lips, pretending even then to nurse his undying wrath and to be bent on following up with coarse threats of revenge his stark and silent enemy.
So far the Times. But to Colonel Kelmscott, reading in between the lines as he went, there was more in it than even that. He saw, though dimly, some hint of a motive. For it was at Mambury that all these things had taken place; and it was at Mambury that the secret of Guy Waring's descent lay buried, as he thought, in the parish registers. What it all meant, Colonel Kelmscott couldn't indeed wholly understand; but many things he knew which the writer of the account in the Times knew not. He knew that Nevitt was a clerk in the bank where he himself kept his account, and to which he had given orders to pay in the six thousand to Cyril's credit, at Cyril's bankers. He knew, therefore, that Nevitt might thus have been led to suspect the real truth of the case as to the two so-called Warings. He knew that Cyril had just received the six thousand. Trying to put these facts together and understand their meaning he utterly failed; but this much at least was clear to him, he thought—the reason for the murder was something connected with a search for the entry of his own clandestine marriage.
He looked down at the paper again. Great heavens, what was this? "It is rumoured that a further inducement to the crime may perhaps be sought in the fact that the deceased gentleman had a large sum of money in his possession in Bank of England notes at the time of his death. These notes he carried in a pocket-book about his person, where they were seen by the landlord of the Talbot Arms at Mambury, the night before the supposed murder. When the body was discovered by the side of the brook, two days later, the notes were gone. The pockets were carefully searched by order of the police, but no trace of the missing money could be discovered. It is now conjectured that Mr. Guy Waring, who is known to have lost heavily in the Rio Negro Diamond Mines, may have committed the crime from purely pecuniary motives, in order to release himself from his considerable and very pressing financial embarrassments."
The paper dropped from Colonel Kelmscott's hands. His eyes ceased to see. His arm fell rigid. This last horrible suggestion proved too much for him to bear. He shrank from it like poison. That a son of his own, unacknowledged or not, should be a criminal—a murderer—was terrible enough; but that he should even be suspected of having committed murder for such base and vulgar motives as mere thirst of gain was more than the blood of the Kelmscotts could put up with. The unhappy father had said to himself in his agony at first that if Guy really killed that prying bank clerk at all, it was no doubt in defence of his mother's honour. THAT was a reason a Kelmscott could understand. That, if not an excuse, was at least a palliation. But to be told he had killed him for a roll of bank-notes—oh, horrible, incredible; his reason drew back at it. That was a depth to which the Kelmscott idiosyncrasy could never descend. The Colonel in his horror refused to believe it.
He put his hands up feebly to his throbbing brow. This was a ghastly idea—a ghastly accusation. The man called Waring had dragged the honour of the Kelmscotts through the mud of the street. There was but one comfort left. He never bore that unsullied name. Nobody would know he was a Kelmscott of Tilgate.
The Colonel rose from his seat, and staggered across the floor. Half-way to the door, he reeled and stopped short. The veins of his forehead were black and swollen. He had the same strange feeling in his head as he experienced on the day when Granville left—only a hundred times worse. The two halves of his brain were opening and shutting. His temples seemed too full; he fancied there was something wrong with his forehead somewhere. He reeled once more, like a drunken man. Then he clutched at a chair and sat down. His brain was flooded.
He collapsed all at once, mumbling to himself some inarticulate gibberish. Half an hour later, the servants came in and found him. He was seated in his chair, still doddering feebly. The house was roused. A doctor was summoned, and the Colonel put to bed. Lady Emily watched him with devoted care. But it was all in vain. The doctor shook his head the moment he examined him. "A paralytic stroke," he said gravely; "and a very serious one. He seems to have had a slighter attack some time since, and to have wholly neglected it. A great blood-vessel in the brain must have given way with a rush. I can hold out no hope. He won't live till morning."
And indeed, as it turned out, about ten that night the Colonel's loud and stentorious breathing began to fail slowly. The intervals grew longer and longer between each recurrent gasp, and life died away at last in imperceptible struggles.
By two in the morning, Kelmscott of Tilgate lay dead on his bed; and his two unacknowledged and unrecognised sons were the masters of his property.
But one of them was at that moment being tossed about wildly on the waves of Biscay; and the other was locked up on a charge of murder in the county jail at Tavistock, in Devonshire.
Meanwhile, at the other house at Chetwood, where these tidings were being read with almost equal interest, Elma Clifford laid down the paper on the table with a very pale face, and looked at her mother. Mrs. Clifford, all solicitous watchfulness for the effect on Elma, looked in return with searching eyes at her daughter. Then Elma opened her lips like one who talks in her sleep, and spoke out twice in two short disconnected sentences. The first time she said simply, "He didn't do it, I know," and the second time, with all the intensity of her emotional nature, "Mother, mother, whatever turns up, I MUST go there."
"HE will be there," Mrs. Clifford interposed, after a painful pause.
And Elma answered dreamily, with her great eyes far away, "Yes, of course, I know he will. And I must be there too, to see how far, if at all, I can help them."
"Yes, darling," her mother replied, stroking her daughter's hair with a caressing hand. She knew that when Elma spoke in a tone like that, no power on earth could possibly restrain her.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
MISTAKEN IDENTITY
To Cyril Waring himself, the arrest at Dover came as an immense surprise; rather a surprise, indeed, than a shock just at first, for he could only treat it as a mistaken identity. The man the police wanted was Guy, not himself; and that Guy should have done it was clearly incredible.
As he landed from the Ostend packet, recalled to England unexpectedly by the announcement that the Rio Negro Diamond Mines had gone with a crash—and no doubt involved Guy in the common ruin—Cyril was astonished to find himself greeted on the Admiralty Pier by a policeman, who tapped him on the shoulder with the casual remark, "I think your name's Waring."
Cyril answered at once, "Yes, my name's Waring."
It didn't occur to him at the moment that the man meant to arrest him.
"Then you're wanted," the minion of authority answered, seizing his arm rather gruffly. "We've got a warrant out to-day against you, my friend. You'd better come along with me quietly to the station."
"A warrant!" Cyril repeated, amazed, shaking off the man's hand.
"There must be some mistake somewhere."
The policeman smiled. "Oh yes," he answered briskly, with some humour in his tone. "There's always a mistake, of course, in all these arrests. You never get a hold of the right man just at first. It's sure to be a case of his twin brother. But there ain't no mistake this time, don't you fear. I knowed you at once, when I see you, by your photograph. Though we were looking out for you, to be sure, going the other way. But it's you all right. There ain't a doubt about that. Warrant in the name of Guy Waring, gentleman; wanted for the wilful murder of a man unknown, said to be one McGregor, alias Montague Nevitt, on the 27th instant, at Mambury, in Devonshire."
Cyril gave a sudden start at the conjunction of names, which naturally increased his captor's suspicions. "But there IS a mistake, though," he said angrily, "even on your own showing. You've got the wrong man. It's not I that am wanted. My name's Cyril Waring, and Guy is my brother's. Though Guy can't have murdered Mr. Nevitt, either, if it comes to that; they were most intimate friends. However, that's neither here nor there. I'm Cyril, not Guy; I'm not your prisoner."
"Oh yes, you are, though," the officer answered, holding his arm very tight, and calling mutely for assistance by a glance at the other policemen. "I've got your photograph in my pocket right enough. Here's the man we've orders to arrest at once. I suppose you won't deny, now, that's your living image."
Cyril glanced at the photograph with another start of surprise. Sure enough, it WAS Guy; his last new cabinet portrait. The police must be acting under some gross misapprehension.
"That man's my brother," he said confidently, brushing the photograph aside. "I can't understand it at all. This is extremely odd. It's impossible my brother can even be suspected of committing murder."
The policeman smiled cynically. "Well, it ain't impossible your brother's brother can be suspected, anyhow," he said, with a quiet air of superior knowledge. "The good old double trick's been tried on once too often. If I was you, I wouldn't say too much. Whatever you say may be used as evidence at the trial against you. You just come along quietly to the station with me—take his other arm, Jim, that's right: no violence please, prisoner—and we'll pretty soon find out whether you're the man we've got orders to arrest, or his twin brother." And he winked at his ally. He was proud of having effected the catch of the season.
"But I AM his twin brother," Cyril said, half struggling still to release himself. "You can't take me up on that warrant, I tell you. It's not my name. I'm not the man you've orders to look for."
"Oh, that's all right," the constable answered as before, with an incredulous smile. "Don't you go trying to obstruct the police in the exercise of their duty. If I can't take you up on the warrant as it stands, well, anyhow, I can arrest you on suspicion all the same, for looking so precious like the photograph of the man as is wanted. Twin brothers ain't got any call, don't you know, to sit, turn about, for one another's photographs. It hinders the administration of justice; that's where it is. And remember, whatever you choose to say may be used as evidence at the trial against you."
Thus adjured, Cyril yielded at last to force majeure and walked arm in arm between the two policemen, followed by a large and admiring crowd, to the nearest station.
But the matter was far less easily arranged than at first imagined. An innocent man who knows his own innocence, taken up in mistake for a brother whom he believes to be equally incapable of the crime with which he is charged, naturally expects to find no difficulty at all in proving his identity and escaping from custody on a false charge of murder. But the result of a hasty examination at the station soon effectually removed this little delusion. His own admission that the photograph was a portrait of Guy, and his resemblance to it in every leading particular, made the authorities decide on the first blush of the thing this was really the man Scotland Yard was in search of. He was trying to escape them on the ridiculous pretext that he was in point of fact his own twin brother. The inspector declined to let him go for the night. He wasn't going to repeat the mistake that was made in the Lefroy case, he said very decidedly. He would send the suspected person under escort to Tavistock.
So to Tavistock Cyril went, uncertain as yet what all this could mean, and ignorant of the crime with which he was charged, if indeed any crime had been really committed. All the way down, an endless string of questions suggested themselves one by one to his excited mind. Was Nevitt really dead? And if so, who had killed him? Was it suicide to escape from the monetary embarrassments brought about by the failure of the Rio Negro Diamond Mines, or was it accident or mischance? Or was it in fact a murder? And in any case—strangest of all—where was Guy? Why didn't Guy come forward and court inquiry? For as yet, of course, Cyril hadn't received his brother's letter, with the incriminating pocket-book and the three thousand pounds; nor indeed, for several days after, as things turned out, was there even a possibility of his ever receiving it.
Next morning, however, when Cyril was examined before the Tavistock magistrates, he began to realize the whole strength of the case against him. The proceedings were purely formal, as the lawyers said; yet they were quite enough to make Cyril's cheek turn pale with horror. One witness after another came forward and swore to him. The station-master at Mambury gave evidence that he had made inquiries on the platform after Nevitt by name; the inn-keeper deposed as to his excited behaviour when he called at the Talbot Arms, and his recognition of McGregor as the person he was in search of; the boy of whom Guy had inquired at the gate unhesitatingly set down the conversation to Cyril. None of them had the faintest doubt in his own mind—each swore—that the prisoner before the magistrates was the self-same person who went over to Mambury on that fatal day, and who followed Montague Nevitt down the path by the river.
As Cyril listened, one terrible fact dawned clearer and clearer upon his brain. Every fragment of evidence they piled up against himself made the case against Guy look blacker and blacker.
The magistrates accepted the proofs thus tendered, and Cyril, as yet unassisted by professional advice, was remanded accordingly till next morning.
Just as he was about to leave the Sessions House in a tumult of horror, fear, and suspense, somebody close by tapped him on the shoulder gravely, after a few whispered words with the chairman and the magistrates. Cyril turned round, and saw a burly man with very large hands, whom he remembered to have had pointed out to him in London, and, strange to say, by Montague Nevitt himself—as the eminent Q.C., Mr. Gilbert Gildersleeve.
The great advocate was pale, but very sincere and earnest. Cyril noticed his manner was completely changed. It was clear some overmastering idea possessed his soul.
"Mr. Waring," he said, looking him full in the face, "I see you're unrepresented. This is a case in which I take a very deep interest. My conduct's unprofessional, I know—point-blank against all our recognised etiquette—but perhaps you'll excuse it. Will you allow me to undertake your defence in this matter?"
Cyril turned round to him with truly heartfelt thanks. It was a great relief to him, alone and in doubt, and much wondering about Guy, to hear a friendly word from whatever quarter.
And Cyril knew he was safe in Gilbert Gildersleeve's hands: the greatest criminal lawyer of the day in England might surely be trusted to set right such a mere little error of mistaken identity. Though for Guy—whenever Guy gave himself up to the police—Cyril felt the position was far more dangerous. He couldn't believe, indeed, that Guy was guilty; yet the circumstances, he could no longer conceal from himself, looked terribly black against him.
"You're too good," he cried, taking the lawyer's hand in his with very fervent gratitude. "How can I thank you enough? I'm deeply obliged to you."
"Not at all," Gilbert Gildersleeve answered, with very blanched lips. He was ashamed of his duplicity. "You've nothing to thank me for. This case is a simple one, and I'd like to see you out of it. I've met your brother; and the moment I saw you I knew you weren't he, though you're very like him. I should know you two apart wherever I saw you."
"That's curious," Cyril cried, "for very few people know us from one another, except the most intimate friends."
The Q.C. looked at him with a very penetrating glance. "I had occasion to see your brother not long since," he answered slowly, "and his features and expression fastened themselves indelibly on my mind's eye. I should know you from him at a glance. This case, as you say, is one of mistaken identity. That's just why I'm so anxious to help you well through it."
And indeed, Gilbert Gildersleeve, profoundly agitated as he was, saw in the accident a marvellous chance for himself to secure a diversion of police attention from the real murderer. The fact was, he had passed twenty-four hours of supreme misery. As soon as he learned from common report that "the murderer was caught, and was being brought to Tavistock," he took it for granted at first that Guy hadn't gone to Africa at all, but had left by rail for the East, and been arrested elsewhere. That belief filled him full of excruciating terrors. For Gilbert Gildersleeve, accidental manslaughterer as he was, was not by any means a depraved or wholly heartless person. Big, blustering, and gruff, he was yet in essence an honest, kind-hearted, unemotional Englishman. His one desire now was to save his wife and daughter from further misery; and if he could only save them, he was ready to sacrifice for the moment, to a certain extent, Guy Waring's reputation. But if Guy Waring himself had stood before him in the dock, he must have stepped forward to confess. The strain would have been too great for him. He couldn't have allowed an innocent man to be hanged in his place. Come what might, in that case he must let his wife and daughter go, and save the innocent by acknowledging himself guilty. So, when he looked at the prisoner, it gave him a shock of joy to see that fortune had once more befriended him. Thank Heaven, thank Heaven, it wasn't the man they wanted at all. This was the other brother of the two—Cyril, the painter, not Guy, the journalist.
In a moment the acute and experienced criminal hand recognised that this chance told unconsciously in his own favour. Like every other suspected person, he wanted time, and time would be taken up in proving an alibi for Cyril, as well as showing by concurrent proof that he was not his brother. Meanwhile, suspicion would fix itself still more firmly upon Guy, whose flight would give colour to the charges brought against him by the authorities.
So the great Q.C. determined to take up Cyril Waring's case as a labour of love, and didn't doubt he would succeed in finally proving it.