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.