The Namaqua shook his head again with a laugh of dissent. Oh no; not like that. It had happened quite otherwise. The missing white man was well and vigorous, a slap on his own chest sufficiently indicated that news. He placed his two first fingers in the ground, astride like legs, and made them walk along fast, one in front of the other. The white man had gone away. He had gone on foot. Granville nodded acquiescence. The savage took water in a calabash and laid it on the floor. Then he walked once more with his fingers, as if on a long and weary march, to the water's brink. Granville nodded comprehension again. He understood the signs. The white man had gone away, alone, on foot—and seaward.

At that instant, with a sudden cry of terror, the invalid's hands went down to his waist, where he wore the girdle that contained those precious diamonds—the diamonds that were to be the ransom of some fraction of Tilgate. An awful sense of desertion broke over him all at once. He called aloud in his horror. It was too much to believe. The girdle was gone, and the diamonds with it!

Hypocrite! Hypocrite! Thief! Murderer! Robber! He had trusted that vile creature, that plausible wretch, in spite of all the horrible charges he knew against him. And THIS was the sequel of their talk that day! THIS was how Guy Waring had requited his confidence.

He had stolen the fruits of eighteen months' labour.

Granville turned to the Namaqua, wild with his terrible loss, and pointed angrily to his loins, where the diamonds were not. The savage nodded; looked wise and shook his head; pretended to gird himself round the waist with a cloth; then went over to Granville, who lay still in the straw, undid an imaginary belt, with deliberate care, tied it round his own body above the other one, with every appearance of prudence and forethought, counted the small stones in it one by one, in his hand, to the exact number, with grotesque fidelity, and finally set his fingers to walk a second time at a rapid pace, in the direction of the calabash which represented the ocean.

Granville fell back on his wooden pillow with a horrible groan of awakened distrust. The man had gone off, that was clear, and had stolen his diamonds That is what comes of intrusting your life and property to a discovered murderer. How could he ever have been such a fool? He would never forgive himself.

The desertion itself was bad enough in all conscience; but it was as nothing at all in Granville's mind to the wickedness of the robbery.

He might have known it, of course. How that fellow toiled and moiled and gloated over his wretched diamonds! How little he seemed to think of the stain of blood on his hands, and how much of the mere chance of making filthy lucre! Pah! Pah! it was pitiable. The man's whole mind was distorted by a hideous fungoid growth—the love of gain, which is the root of all evil. For a few miserable stones, he would plunder his own brother, lying helpless and ill in that African hut, and make off with the booty himself, saving his own skin, seaward.

If it hadn't been for the unrequited kindness of these mere savage Namaquas, Granville cried to himself in his bitterness, he might have died of want in the open desert. And now he would go down to the coast, after all, a ruined man, penniless and friendless. It was a hard thought indeed for a Kelmscott to think he should have been abandoned and robbed by his own half-brother, and should owe his life now to a heathen African. The tender mercies of a naked barbarian in a mud-built hut were better than the false friendship of his father's son, the true heir of Tilgate.

It was miserable! pitiable! The shock of that discovery threw Granville back once more into a profound fever. For several hours he relapsed into delirium. And the worst of it was, the negroes wouldn't let him die quietly in his own plain way. In the midst of it all, he was dimly aware of a dose thrust down his throat. It was the Namaqua administering him a pill—some nauseous native decoction, no doubt—which tasted as if it were made of stiff white paper.



CHAPTER XXXVII.

AUX ARMES!



For a day or two more, Granville remained seriously ill in the dirty hut. At the end of that time, weak and wasted as he was, he insisted upon getting up and setting out alone on his long march seaward.

It was a wild resolve. He was utterly unfit for it. The hospitable Namaqua, whose wives had nursed him well through that almost hopeless illness, did his best to persuade the rash Englishman from so mad a course, by gestures and entreaties, in his own mute language. But Granville was obstinate. He would NOT sit down quietly and be robbed like this of the fruit of his labours. He would not be despoiled. He would not be trampled upon. He would make for the coast, if he staggered in like a skeleton, and would confront the robber with his own vile crime, be it at Angra Pequena, or Cape Town, or London, or Tilgate.

In short, he would do much as Guy himself had done when he discovered Montague Nevitt's theft of the six thousand. He would follow the villain till he ran him to earth, and would tax him at last to his face with the open proofs of his consummate treachery. What's bred in the bone will out in the blood. The Kelmscott strain worked alike its own way in each of them.

The Namaqua, to be sure, tried in vain to explain to Granville by elaborate signs that the other white man had given orders to the contrary. The other white man had strictly enjoined upon him not to let the invalid escape from his hut on any pretext whatever. The other white man had promised him a reward, a very large reward—money, guns, ammunition—if he kept him safely and didn't allow him to escape. Granville Kelmscott smiled to himself a bitter, cynical, smile. Poor confiding savage! He didn't know Guy as well as he, his brother, did.

And yet, in the midst of it all, in spite of the revulsion, Granville was conscious now and then of some little ingratitude somewhere to his half-brother's memory. After all, Guy had shown him time and again no small kindness. Some excuse should be made for a man who saves his own life first in very dire extremities. But none, no, none for one who has the incredible and inhuman meanness to rob his own brother of his hard-earned gams, in a strange wild land, when he thinks him dying.

For it was the robbery, not the desertion, Granville could never forgive. The man who was capable of doing that basest of acts was capable also of murder or any crime in the decalogue.

So the fevered white man rose at last one morning on his shrunken limbs, and staggered, as best he might, from his protector's hut in a wild impulse of resolution, on his mad journey seaward. When the Namaqua saw nothing on earth would induce him to remain, he shouldered his arms and went out beside him, fully equipped for fight with matchlock and assegai. Not that the savage made any undue pretence to a purely personal devotion to the belated white man. On the contrary, he signified to Granville with many ingenious signs that he was afraid of losing the great reward he had been promised, if once he let the invalid get out of his sight unattended.

Granville smiled once more that bitter smile of new-born cynicism. Well, let the fellow follow him if he liked! He would reward him himself if ever they reached the coast in safety. And in any case, it was better to go attended by a native. An interpreter who can communicate in their own tongue with the people through whose territory you are going to pass is always, useful in a savage country.

How Granville got over that terrible journey seaward he could never tell. He crawled on and on, supported by the faithful Namaqua with unfailing good-humour, over that endless veldt, for three long days of wretched footsore marching. And for three long nights he slept, or lay awake, under the clear desert stars, on the open ground of barren Namaqua land. It was a terrible time. Worn and weary with the fever, Granville was wholly unfit for any kind of travelling. Nothing but the iron constitution of the Kelmscotts could ever have stood so severe an ordeal. But the son of six generations of soldiers, who had commanded in the fever-stricken flats of Walcheren, or followed Wellesley through the jungles of tropical India, or forced their way with Napier into the depths of Abyssinia, was not to be daunted even by the nameless horrors of that South African desert. Granville still endured, for three days and nights, and was ready to march, or crawl on, once more, upon the fourth morning.

Here, however, his Namaqua, guide, with every appearance of terror, made strong warnings of danger. The country beyond, he signified by strange gestures, lay in the hands of a hostile tribe, hereditarily at war with his fellow-clansmen. He didn't even know whether the other white man, with the diamonds round his waist, had got safely through, or whether the hostile tribe beyond the frontier had assegaied him and "eaten him up," as the picturesque native phrase goes. It was difficult enough for even a strong warrior to force his way through that district with a good company of followers; impossible for a single weak invalid like Granville, attended only by one poor, ill-armed Namaqua.

So the savage seemed to say in his ingenious pantomime. If they went on, they'd be killed and eaten up resistlessly. If they stopped they might pull through. They must wait and camp there. For what they were to wait, Granville hadn't the faintest conception. But the Namaqua insisted upon it, and Granville was helpless as a child in his hands. The man was alarmed, apparently, for his promised reward. If Granville insisted, he showed in very frank dumb show, why—a thrust with the assegai explained the rest most persuasively. Granville still had his revolver, to be sure, and a few rounds of ball cartridge. But he was too weak to show fight; the savage overmastered him.

They were seated on a stony ridge or sharp hog's back, overlooking the valley of a dry summer stream. The watershed on which they sat separated, with its chine of rugged rocks, the territory of the two rival tribes. But the Namaqua was evidently very little afraid that the enemy might transgress the boundaries of his fellow-tribesmen. He dared not himself go beyond the jagged crest of the ridge; but he seemed to think it pretty certain the people of the other tribe wouldn't, for their part, in turn come across to molest him. He sat down there doggedly, as if expecting something or other to turn up in the course of time; and more than once he made signs to Granville which the Englishman interpreted to mean that after so many days and nights from some previous event unspecified, somebody would arrive on the track from the coast at the point of junction between the hostile races.

Granville was gazing at the Namaqua in the vain attempt to interpret these signs more fully to himself, when, all of a sudden, an unexpected noise in the valley below attracted his attention. He pricked up his ears, Impossible! Incredible! It couldn't be—yes, it was—the sharp hiss of firearms!

At the very same moment the Namaqua leapt to his feet in sudden alarm, and, shading his eyes with his dusky hand, gazed intently in front of him. For a minute or so he stood still, with brows knit and neck craning. Then he called out something in an excited tone two or three times over in his own tongue to Granville. The Englishman stared in the same direction, but could make out nothing definite just at first, in the full glare of the sunlight. But the Namaqua, with a cry of joy, held up his two fingers as before, to symbolize the two white men, and pointed with one of them to his guest, while with the other he indicated some object in the valley, nodding many times over. Granville seized his meaning at once. Could it be true, what he said in this strange mute language? Could relief be at hand? Could the firing beneath show that Guy was returning?

As he looked and strained his eyes, peering down upon the red plain, under the shadow of his open palm, the objects by the water-course grew gradually clearer. Granville could make out now that a party of natives, armed with spears and matchlocks, was attacking some little encampment on the bank of the dry torrent. The small force in the encampment was returning the fire with great vigour and spirit, though apparently over-powered by the superior numbers of their swarming assailants. Even as Granville looked, their case grew more desperate. A whole horde of black men seemed to be making an onset on some small white object, most jealously guarded, round which the defenders of the camp rallied with infinite energy. At the head of the little band of strangers, a European in a pith helmet was directing the fire, and fighting hard himself for the precious white object. The rest were blacks, he thought, in half-civilized costume. Granville's heart gave a bound as the leader sprang forth upon one approaching savage. His action, as he leapt, stamped the man at once. There was Kelmscott in the leap. Granville knew in a second it was indeed Guy Waring.

The Namaqua recognised him too, and pointed enthusiastically forward. Granville saw what he meant. To the front! To the front! If there was fighting to be done, let them help their friends. Let them go forward and claim the great reward offered.

Next moment, with a painful thrill of shame and remorse, the Englishman saw what was the nature of the object they were so jealously guarding. His heart stood still within him. It was a sort of sedan chair, or invalid litter, borne on poles by four native porters. Talk about coals of fire! Granville Kelmscott hardly knew how to forgive himself for his unworthy distrust. Then Guy must have reached the coast in safety, after leaving him in charge of the Namaqua and fighting his way through, and now he was on his way back to the interior again, with a sufficient escort and a palanquin to fetch him.

Even as he looked, the assailants closed in more fiercely than ever on the faltering little band. One of them thrust out with an assegai at Guy. In an agony of horror, Granville cried aloud where he stood. Surely, surely, they must be crushed to earth. No arms of precision could ever avail them against such a swarm of assailants, poured forth over their camp as if from some human ant-hill.

"Let us run!" the sick man cried to the Namaqua, pointing to the fight below; and the Namaqua, comprehending the gesture, if not the words, set forward to run with him down the slope into the valley.

At about a hundred yards off from the crowd, Granville, crouched behind a clump of thorny acacia, and, signalling to the Namaqua to hide at the same time, drew his revolver and fired point-blank at the hindmost natives.

The effect was electrical. In a moment the savages turned and gazed around them astonished. One of their number was hit and wounded in the leg. Granville had aimed so purposely, to maim and terrify them. The natives faltered and fell back. As they did so, Granville emerged from the shelter of the acacia bush, and fired a second shot from another point at them. At the same instant the Namaqua raised a loud native battle-cry, and brandished his assegai. The effect was electrical. The hostile tribe broke up in wild panic at once. They cried in their own tongue that the Namaquas were down upon them, under English guidance: and, quick as lightning, they dispersed as if by magic, to hide themselves about in the thick bush jungle.

Two seconds later, Guy was wringing Granville's hand in a fervour of gratitude. Each man had saved the other's life. In the rapid interchange of question and answer that followed, one point alone puzzled them both for a minute or two.

"But why on earth didn't you leave a line to explain what you'd done?" Granville cried, now thoroughly ashamed of his unbelief, "If only I'd known, you were coming back to the village it would have saved me so much distress, so much sleepless misery."

"Why, so I did," Guy answered, still thoroughly out of breath, and stained with blood and powder. "I tore a leaf from my note-book and gave it to the Namaqua, explaining to him by signs that he was to let you have it at once, the moment you were conscious. Here, you, sir," he went on, turning round to their faithful black ally, and holding up the note-book before his eyes to refresh his memory, "why didn't you give it to the gentleman as I told you?"

The Namaqua, catching hastily at the meaning from the mere tone of the question, as well as from Guy's instinctive and graphic imitation of the act of writing, pulled out from his waistband the last relics of a very brown and tattered fragment of paper, on which were still legible in pencil the half-obliterated words: "My dear Granville,—I find there is no chance of conveying you to the coast through the territory of the next tribe in your present condition, unless—-"

The rest was torn off. Guy looked at it dubiously. But the Namaqua, anxious to show he had followed out all instructions to the very letter, tore off the next scrap before their eyes, rolled it up between his palms into a nice greasy pill, and proceeded to offer it for Granville's acceptance. The misapprehension was too absurd. Guy went off into a hearty peal of laughter at once. The Namaqua had taken the mysterious signs for "a very great medicine," and had administered the magical paper accordingly, as he understood himself to be instructed, at fixed intervals to his unfortunate patient. That was the medicine Granville remembered having forced down his throat at the moment when he first learned, as he thought, his half-brother's treachery.



CHAPTER XXXVIII.

NEWS FROM THE CAPE.



At the Holkers' at Chetwood, one evening some days later, Cyril Waring met Elma Clifford once more, the first time for months, and had twenty minutes' talk in the tea-room alone with her. Contrary to his rule, he had gone to the Holkers' party that night, for a man can't remain a recluse all his life, no matter how hard he tries, merely because his brother's suspected of having committed a murder. In course of time, the attitude palls upon him. For the first year after Guy's sudden and mysterious disappearance, indeed, Cyril refused all invitations point-blank, except from the most intimate friends; the shame and disgrace of that terrible episode weighed him down so heavily that he couldn't bear to go out in the world among unsympathetic strangers.

But the deepest sorrow wears away by degrees, and at the end of twelve months Cyril found he could mix a little more unreservedly at last among his fellow-men. The hang-dog air sat ill upon his frank, free nature. This invitation to the Holkers', too, had one special attraction: he knew it was a house where he was almost certain of meeting Elma. And since Elma insisted now on writing to him constantly—she was a self-willed young woman was Elma, and would have her way—he really saw no reason on earth himself why he shouldn't meet her. To meet is one thing, don't you know—to marry, another. At least so fifty generations of young people have deluded themselves under similar circumstances into believing.

Elma was in the room before him, prettier than ever, people said, in the pale red ball-dress which exactly suited her gipsy-like eyes and creamy complexion. As she entered she saw Sir Gilbert Gildersleeve with his wife and Gwendoline standing in the corner by the big piano. Gwendoline looked pale and preoccupied, as she had always looked since Granville Kelmscott disappeared, leaving behind him no more definite address for love-letters than simply Africa; and Lady Gildersleeve was, as usual, quite subdued and broken. But the judge himself, consoled by his new honours, seemed, as time wore on, to have recovered a trifle of his old blustering manner. A knighthood had reassured him. He was talking to Mr. Holker in a loud voice as Elma approached him from behind.

"Yes, a very curious coincidence," he was just saying, in his noisy fashion, with one big burly hand held demonstratively before him. "A very curious and unexplained coincidence. They both vanished into space about the self-same time. And nothing more has ever since been heard of them. Quite an Arabian Nights' affair in its way—the Enchanted Carpet sort of business, don't you know—wafted through the air unawares, like Sinbad the Sailor, or the One-eyed Calender, from London to Bagdad, or Timbuctoo or St. Petersburg. The OTHER young man one understands about, of course; HE had sufficient reasons of his own, no doubt, for leaving a country which had grown too warm for him. But that Granville Kelmscott, a gentleman of means, the heir to such a fine estate as Tilgate, should disappear into infinity leaving no trace behind, like a lost comet—and at the very moment, too, when he was just about to come into the family property—why, I call it... I call it... I call it—"

His jaw dropped suddenly. He grew deadly pale. Words failed his stammering tongue. Do what he would, he couldn't finish his sentence. And yet, nothing very serious had occurred to him in any way. It was merely that, as he uttered these words, he caught Elma Clifford's eye, and saw lurking in it a certain gleam of deadly contempt before which the big blustering man himself had quailed more than once in many a Surrey drawing-room.

For Sir Gilbert Gildersleeve knew, as well as if she had told him the truth in so many words, that Elma Clifford suspected him of being Montague Nevitt's murderer.

Elma came forward, just to break the awkward pause, and shook hands with the party by the piano coldly. Sir Gilbert tried to avoid her; but, with the inherited instinct of her race, Elma cut off his retreat. She boxed him in the corner between the piano and the wall.

"I heard what you were saying just now, Sir Gilbert," she murmured low, but with marked emphasis, after a few polite commonplaces of conversation had first passed between them; "and I want to ask you one question only about the matter. ARE you so sure as you seem of what you said this minute? Are you so sure that Mr. Guy Waring HAD sufficient reasons of his own for wishing to leave the country?"

Before that unflinching eye, the great lawyer trembled, as many a witness had trembled of old under his own cross-examination. But he tried to pass it off just at first with a little society banter. He bowed, and smiled, and pretended to look arch—look arch, indeed, with that ashen, white face of his!—as he answered, with forced humour—

"My dear young lady, Mr. Guy Waring, as I understand, is Mr. Cyril Waring's brother, and as by the law of England the king can do no wrong, so I suppose—"

Elma cut him short in the middle of his sentence with an imperious gesture. He had never cut short an obnoxious and intruding barrister himself with more crushing dignity.

"Mr. Cyril Waring has nothing at all to do with the point, one way or the other," the girl said severely. "Attend to my question. What I ask is this: Why do you, a judge who may one day be called upon to try the case, venture to say, on such partial evidence, that Mr. Guy Waring had sufficient reasons of his own for leaving the country?"

Called upon to try Guy Waring's case! The judge paused abashed. He was very much afraid of her. This girl had such a strange look about the eyes, she made him tremble. People said the Ewes women were the descendants of a witch. And there was something truly witch-like in the way Elma Clifford looked straight down into his eyes. She seemed to see into his very soul. He knew she suspected him.

He shuffled and temporized. "Well, everybody says so, you know," he answered, shrugging his shoulders carelessly. "And what everybody says MUST be true. ... Besides, if HE, didn't do it, who did, I wonder?"

Elma pounced upon her opportunity with a woman's quickness. "Somebody else who was at Mambury that day, no doubt," she replied, with a meaning look. "It MUST have been somebody out of the few who were at Mambury."

That home-thrust told. The judge's colour was livid to look upon. What could this girl mean? How on earth could she know? How had she even found out he was at Mambury at all? A terrible doubt oppressed his soul. Had Gwendoline confided his movements to Elma? He had warned his daughter time and again not to mention the fact, "for fear of misapprehension," he said, with shuffling eyes askance. It was better nobody should know he had been anywhere near Dartmoor on the day of the accident.

However, there was one consolation; the law! the law! She could have no legal proof, and intuition goes for nothing in a court of justice. All the suspicion went against Guy Waring, and Guy Waring—well, Guy Waring had fled the kingdom in the very nick of time, and was skulking now, Heaven alone knew where or why, in the remotest depths of some far African diggings.

And even as he thought it, the servant opened the door, and, in the regulation footman's voice, announced "Mr. Waring."

The judge started afresh. For one moment his senses deceived him sadly. His mind was naturally full of Guy, just now; and as the servant spoke, he saw a handsome young man in evening dress coming up the long drawing-room with the very air and walk of the man he had met that eventful afternoon at the "Duke of Devonshire" at Plymouth. Of course, it was only Cyril; and a minute later the judge saw his mistake, and remembered, with a bitter smile, how conscience makes cowards of us all, as he had often remarked about shaky witnesses in his admirable perorations. But Elma hadn't failed to notice either the start or its reason.

"It's only Mr. Cyril," she said pointedly; "not Mr. Guy, Sir Gilbert. The name came very pat, though. I don't wonder it startled you."

She was crimson herself. The judge moved away with a stealthy uncomfortable air. He didn't half care for this uncanny young woman. A girl who can read people's thoughts like that, a girl who can play with you like a cat with a mouse, oughtn't to be allowed at large in society. She should be shut up in a cage at home like a dangerous animal, and prevented from spying out the inmost history of families.

A little later, Elma had twenty minutes' talk with Cyril alone. It was in the tea-room behind, where the light refreshments were laid out before supper. She spoke low and seriously.

"Cyril," she said, in a tone of absolute confidence—they were not engaged, of course, but still, it had got to plain "Cyril" and "Elma" by this time—"I'm surer of it than ever, no matter what you say. Guy's perfectly innocent. I know it as certainly as I know my own name. I can't be mistaken. And the man who really did it is, as I told you, Sir Gilbert Gildersleeve."

"My dear child," Cyril answered—you call the girl you are in love with "my dear child," when you mean to differ from her, with an air of masculine superiority—"how on earth can that be, when, as I told you, I have Guy's confession in writing, under his own very hand, that he really did it?"

"I don't care a pin for that," Elma cried, with a true woman's contempt for anything so unimportant as mere positive evidence. "Perhaps Sir Gilbert made him do it somehow—compelled him, or coerced him, or willed him, or something—I don't understand these new notions—or perhaps he got him into a scrape and then hadn't the courage or the manliness to get him out of it. But at any rate, I can answer for one thing, I were to go to the stake for it—Sir Gilbert Gildersleeve is the man who's really guilty."

As she spoke, a great shadow darkened the door of the room for a moment ominously. Sir Gilbert looked in with a lady on his arm—the inevitable dowager who refreshes herself continuously at frequent intervals through six hours of entertainment. When he saw those two tete-a-tete, he drew back, somewhat disconcerted.

"Don't let's go in there, Lady Knowles," he whispered to the dowager by his side. "A pair of young people discussing their hearts. We were once young ourselves. It's a pity to disturb them."

And he passed on across the hall towards the great refreshment-room opposite.

"Well, I don't know," Cyril said bitterly, as the judge disappeared through the opposite door. "I wish I could agree with you. But I can't, I can't. The burden of it's heavier than my shoulders can bear. Guy's weak, I know, and might be led half unawares into certain sorts of crime; yet I only knew one man ever likely to lead him—and that was poor Nevitt himself, not Sir Gilbert Gildersleeve, whom he hardly even knew to speak to."

As he paused and reflected, a servant with a salver came up and looked into Cyril's face inquiringly.

"Beg your pardon, sir," he said, hesitating, "but I think you're Mr. Waring."

"That's my name," Cyril answered, with a faint blush on his cheek. "Do you want to speak to me?"

"Yes, sir; there's half-a-crown to pay for porterage, if you please. A telegram for you, sir."

Cyril pulled out the half-a-crown, and tore open the telegram. Its contents were indeed enough to startle him. It was dated "Cape Town," and was as brief as is the wont of cable messages at nine shillings a word—

"Coming home immediately to repay everything and stand my trial. Kelmscott accompanies me. All well.—GUY WARING."

Cyril looked at it with a gasp, and handed it on to Elma. Elma took it in her dainty gloved fingers, and read it through with keen eyes of absorbing interest. Cyril sighed a profound sigh. Elma glanced back at him all triumph. "I told you so," she said, in a very jubilant voice. "He wouldn't do that if he didn't KNOW he was innocent."

At the very same second, a blustering voice was heard above the murmur in the hall without.

"What, half-a-crown for porterage!" it exclaimed in indignant tones. "Why, that's a clear imposition. The people at my house ought never to have sent it on. It's addressed to Woodlands. Unimportant, unimportant! Here, Gwendoline, take your message—some milliner's or dressmaker's appointment for to-morrow, I suppose. Half-a-crown for porterage! They'd no right to bring it."

Gwendoline took the telegram with trembling hands, tore it open all quivers, and broke into a cry of astonishment. Then she fell all at once into her father's arms. Elma understood it all. It was a similar message from Granville Kelmscott to tell the lady of his heart he was coming home to marry her.

Sir Gilbert, somewhat flustered, called for water in haste, and revived the fainting girl by bathing her temples. At last he took up the cause of the mischief himself. As he read it his own face turned white as death. Elma noticed that, too. And no wonder it did—for these were the words of that unexpected message—

"Coming home to claim you by the next mail. Guy Waring accompanies me.—GKANVILLE KELMSCOTT."



CHAPTER XXXIX.

A GLEAM OF LIGHT.



Next day but one, the Companion of St. Michael and St. George came in to Craighton with evil tidings. He had heard in the village that Sir Gilbert Gildersleeve was ill—very seriously ill. The judge had come home from the Holkers' the other evening much upset by the arrival of Gwendoline's telegram.

"Though why on earth should that upset him," Mr. Clifford continued, screwing up his small face with a very wise air, "is more than I can conceive; for I'm sure the Gildersleeves angled hard enough in their time to catch young Kelmscott, by hook or by crook, for their gawky daughter; and now that young Kelmscott telegraphs over to say he's coming home post haste to marry her, Miss Gwendoline faints away, if you please, as she reads the news, and the judge himself goes upstairs as soon as he gets home, and takes to his bed incontinently. But there, the ways of the world are really inscrutable! What reconciles me to life, every day I grow older, is that it's so amusing—so intensely amusing! You never know what's going to turn up next; and what you least expect is what most often happens."

Elma, however, received his news with a very grave face.

"Is he really ill, do you think, papa?" she asked, somewhat anxiously; "or is he only—well—only frightened?"

Mr. Clifford stared at her with a blank leathery face of self-satisfied incomprehension.

"Frightened!" he repeated solemnly; "Sir Gilbert Gildersleeve frightened! And of Granville Kelmscott, too! That's true wit, Elma; the juxtaposition of the incongruous. Why, what on earth has the man got to be frightened of, I should like to know? ... No, no; he's really ill; very seriously ill. Humphreys says the case is a most peculiar one, and he's telegraphed up to town for a specialist to come down this afternoon and consult with him."

And indeed, Sir Gilbert was really very ill. This unexpected shock had wholly unmanned him. To say the truth, the judge had begun to look upon Guy Waring as practically lost, and upon the matter of Montague Nevitt's death as closed for ever. Waring, no doubt, had gone to Africa—under a false name—and proceeded to the diamond fields direct, where he had probably been killed in a lucky quarrel with some brother digger, or stuck through with an assegai by some enterprising Zulu; and nobody had even taken the trouble to mention it.

It's so easy for a man to get lost in the crowd in the Dark Continent! Why, there was Granville Kelmscott, even—a young fellow of means, and the heir of Tilgate, about whom Gwendoline was always moaning and groaning, poor girl, and wouldn't be comforted—there was Granville Kelmscott gone out to Africa, and, hi, presto, disappeared into space without a vapour or a trace, like a conjurer's shilling. It was all very queer; but, then, queer things are the way in Africa.

To be sure, Sir Gilbert had his qualms of conscience, too, over having thus sent off Guy Waring, as he believed, to his grave in Cape Colony. He was not at heart a bad man, though he was pushing, and selfish, and self-seeking, and to a certain extent even—of late—unscrupulous. He had his bad half-hours every now and again with his own moral consciousness. But he had learnt to stifle his doubts and to keep down his terrors. After all, he had told Guy no more than the truth; and if Guy in his panic-terror chose to run away and get killed in South Africa, that was no fault of HIS—he'd only tried to warn the fellow of an impending danger. All's well that ends well; and, to-day, Guy Waring was lost or dead, while he himself was a judge, and a knight to boot, with all trace of his crime destroyed for ever.

So he said to himself, rejoicing, the very day Granville Kelmscott's telegram arrived. But now that he stood face to face again with that pressing terror, his thoughts on the matter were very different. Strange to say, his first idea was this: what a disgraceful shame of that fellow Waring to come to life again thus suddenly on purpose to annoy him! He was really angry, nay, more, indignant. Such shuffling was inexcusable. If Waring meant to give himself up and stand his trial like a man, why the dickens didn't he do it immediately after the—well, the accident? What did he mean by going off for eighteen months undiscovered, and leaving one to build up fresh plans in life, like this—and then coming home on a sudden just on purpose to upset them? It was simply disgraceful. Sir Gilbert felt injured; this man Waring was wronging him. Eighteen months before he was keenly aware that he was unjustly casting a vile and hideous suspicion on an innocent person. But in the intervening period his moral sense had got largely blunted. Familiarity with the hateful plot had warped his ideas about it. Their places were reversed. Sir Gilbert was really aggrieved now that Guy Waring should turn up again, and should venture to vindicate his deeply-wronged character.

The man was as good as dead. Well, and he ought to have stopped so; or else he ought never to have died at all. He ought to have kept himself continually in evidence. But to go away for eighteen months, unknown and unheard of, till one's sense of security had had time to re-establish itself, and then to turn up again like this without one minute's warning—oh, it was infamous, scandalous. The fellow must be devoid of all consideration for others. Sir Gilbert wiped his clammy brow with those ample hands. What on earth was he to do for his wife, and for Gwendoline?

And Gwendoline was so happy, too, over Granville Kelmscott's return! How could he endure that Granville Kelmscott's return should be the signal for discovering her father's sin and shame to her! If only he could have married her off before it all came out! Or if only he could die before the man was tried!—Tried! Sir Gilbert's eyes started from his head with horror. What was that Elma Clifford suggested the other night? Why—if the man was arrested, he would be arrested at Plymouth, the moment he landed, and would be tried for murder at the Western Assizes. And it was he himself, Sir Gilbert Gildersleeve, who was that term to take the Western Circuit.

He would be called upon to sit on the bench himself, and try Guy Waring for the murder he had himself committed!

No wonder that thought sent him ill to bed at once. He lay and tossed all night long in speechless agony and terror. It was an appalling night. Next morning he was found delirious with fever.

When the news reached Elma, she saw its full and fatal significance. Cyril had stopped on for three days at the Holkers', and he came over in the course of the morning to take a walk across the fields with her. Elma was profoundly excited, Cyril could hardly see why.

"This is a terrible thing," she said, "about Sir Gilbert's illness. What I'm afraid of now is that he may die before your brother returns. The shock must have been awful for him; mamma noticed it every bit as much as I did; and so did Miss Ewes. They both said at once, 'This blow will kill him!' And they both knew why, Cyril, as well as I did. It's the Ewes' intuition. We've all of us got it, and we all of us say, at once and unanimously—it was Sir Gilbert Gildersleeve."

"But suppose he DID die," Cyril asked, still sceptical, as he always was when Elma got upon her instinctive consciousness; "what difference would that make? If Guy's innocent, as I suppose in some way he must be, from the tone of his telegram, he'll be acquitted whether Sir Gilbert's alive or not. And if he's guilty—"

He broke off suddenly with an awful pause; the other alternative was too terrible to contemplate.

"But he's NOT guilty," Elma answered with confidence. "I know it more surely now than ever. And the difficulty's this. Nobody knows the real truth, I feel certain, except Sir Gilbert Gildersleeve. And if Sir Gilbert dies unconfessed, the truth dies with him. And then—" She paused a moment. "I'm half afraid," she went on with a doubtful sigh, "your brother's been too precipitate in coming home to face it."

"But, Elma," Cyril cried, "I can't bear to say it—yet one must face the facts—how on earth can he be innocent, when I tell you again and again he wrote to me himself saying he really did it?"

"You never showed me that letter," Elma answered, with a faint undercurrent of reproach in her tone.

"How could I?" Cyril replied. "Even to YOU, Elma, there are some things a man can hardly bear to speak about."

"I have more faith than you, Cyril," Elma answered. "I've never given up believing in Guy all the time. I believe in him still—because I know he's your brother."

There was a short pause, during which neither spoke. They walked along together, looking at each other's faces with half downcast eyes, but with the not unpleasant sense of mute companionship and sympathy in a great sorrow. At last Elma spoke again.

"There was one thing in Guy's telegram," she said, "I didn't quite understand. 'Coming home immediately to repay everything.' What did he mean by that? What has that got to do with Mr. Nevitt's disappearance?"

"Oh, that was quite another matter," Cyril answered, blushing deep with shame, for he couldn't bear to let Elma know Guy was a forger as well as a murderer. "That was something purely personal between us two. He—he owed me money."

Elma's keen eyes read him through at a glance.

"But he said it all in one sentence," she objected, "as if the two went naturally together. Coming home immediately to repay everything and stand my trial. Cyril, Cyril, you've held something back. I believe there's some fearful mistake here somewhere."

"You think so?" Cyril answered, feeling more and more uncomfortable.

"I'm sure of it," Elma replied, with a thrill, reading his thoughts still deeper. "Oh, Cyril"—she seized his arm with a convulsive grip—"for Heaven's sake, go and get it; let me see that letter!"

"I have it here," Cyril answered, pulling it out with some shame from Montague Nevitt's pocket-book, which he wouldn't destroy, and dared not leave about for prying eyes to light upon. "I've carried it day and night, ever since, about with me."

Elma seized it from his hands, and sat down upon a stile, and read it through with profound attention.

At the end she handed it back and tears stood in her eyes. "Cyril," she said, half laughing hysterically and half crying as she spoke, "you've been doing that poor fellow a deep injustice. Oh, don't you see—don't you see it? That isn't the letter of a man who has committed a murder. It's the letter of a man who has unwittingly and unwillingly done you some personal wrong, and is eager to repair it. My darling, my darling, you've misread it altogether. It isn't about Montague Nevitt's death at all; it's about nothing an earth but some private money matter. More than that, when it was written, Guy didn't yet know Mr. Nevitt was dead. He didn't know he was suspected. He didn't know anything. I wonder you don't see! I wish to Heaven you'd shown me that letter months ago! Sir Gilbert fastened suspicion on the wrong man; and this letter has made you accept it too easily. Guy went to Africa—that's as plain as words can put it—to make money of his own to repay what he owed you. And it's this, the purely personal and unimportant charge, he's coming home to give himself up upon."

A light seemed to burst on Cyril's mind as she spoke. For the very first time, he felt a gleam of hope. Elma was right, after all, he believed. Guy was wholly innocent of the greater crime; and his heart-broken letter had only meant to deal with the question of the forgery.

But Cyril had heard of the murder first, and had had that most in his mind when the letter reached him; so he interpreted it at once as referring to the capital charge, and never dreamt for a moment of its real narrower meaning.

That evening, when the messenger came back from "kind inquiries" at Woodlands, Elma asked, with hushed awe, how Sir Gilbert was going on.

"Very poorly, miss," the servant answered. "The doctor says he's sunk dreadful low; and the butler thinks he has something on his mind he can't get out in his wanderings. He's in a terrible bad way. They wouldn't be astonished if he don't live to morning."

So Elma went to bed that night trembling most for the result of Sir Gilbert's illness.



CHAPTER XL.

THE BOLT FALLS.



All the way home on that long journey from Cape Town, as the two half-brothers lounged on deck together in their canvas chairs, Granville Kelmscott was wholly at a loss to understand what seemed to him Guy Waring's unaccountable and almost incredible levity. The man's conduct didn't in the least resemble that of a person who is returning to give himself up on a charge of wilful murder. On the contrary, Guy showed no signs of remorse or mental agony in any way; he seemed rather elated, instead, at the pleasing thought that he was going home, with his diamonds all turned at the Cape into solid coin, to make his peace once more with his brother Cyril.

To be sure, at times he did casually allude to some expected unpleasantness when he arrived in England; yet he treated it, Granville noticed, as though hanging were at worst but a temporary inconvenience. Granville wondered whether, after all, he could have some complete and crushing answer to that appalling charge; on any other supposition, his spirits and his talk were really little short of what one might expect from a madman.

And indeed, now and again, Granville did really begin to suspect that something had gone wrong somewhere with Guy Waring's intellect. The more he thought over it, the more likely did this seem, for Guy talked on with the greatest composure about his plans for the future "when this difficulty was cleared up," as though a trial for murder were a most ordinary occurrence—an accident that might happen to any gentleman any day. And, if so, was it possible that Guy had gone wrong in his head BEFORE the affray with Montague Nevitt? That seemed likely enough; for when Granville remembered Guy's invariable gentleness and kindness to himself, his devotion in sickness and in the trials of the desert, his obvious aversion to do harm to any one, and, above all, his heartfelt objection to shedding human blood, Granville was constrained to believe his newly found half-brother, if ever he committed the murder at all, must have committed it while in a state of unsound mind, deserving rather of pity than of moral reprehension. He comforted himself, indeed, with this consoling idea—he could never believe a Kelmscott of Tilgate, when clothed and in his right mind, could be guilty of such a detestable and motiveless crime as the wilful murder of Montague Nevitt.

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 mass 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 ashore. 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 promptitude.

"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 unobstrusively 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 charget 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 assizes. 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 blustering, 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 pricks 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 passing turn, I assure you. I couldn't conscientiously say you'd be unfit for duty by the time the assizes 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 circumstantial, 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 assizes. 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 Assizes, 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."

Elma laid down the paper with a swimming head. Too ill to return. She wasn't at all surprised at it. It was almost more than human nature could stand, for a man to sit as judge over another to investigate the details of the crime he had himself committed. But the suggestion of his absence ruined her peace of mind. She couldn't sleep that night. She felt sure now there was no hope left. Guy would almost certainly be convicted of murder.

Next morning she took her seat in court, with her mother and Cyril, as soon as the assize hall was opened to the public. But her cheek was very pale, and her eyes were weary. Places had been assigned them by the courtesy of the authorities, as persons interested in the case; and Elma looked eagerly towards the door in the corner, by which, as the usher told her, the judge was to enter. There was a long interval, and the usual unseemly turmoil of laughing and talking went on among the spectators in the well below. Some of them had opera-glasses and stared about them freely. Others quizzed the counsel, the officers, and the witnesses. Then a hush came over them, and the door opened. Cyril was merely aware of the usual formalities and of a judicial wig making its way, with slow dignity, to the vacant bench. But Elma leaned forward in a tumult of feeling. Her face all at once turned scarlet with excitement.

"What's the matter, darling?" her mother asked, in a sympathetic tone, noticing that something had profoundly stirred her.

And Elma answered with bated breath, in almost inarticulate tones, "Don't you see? Don't you see, mother? Just look at the judge! It's himself! It's Sir Gilbert!"

And so indeed it was. Against all hope, he had come over. At the very last moment a telegram had been handed to the convalescent at Spa:

"Fallen from my horse. A nasty tumble. Sustained severe internal injuries. Impossible to go the Western Circuit, Relieve me if you can. Wire reply,—ATKINS."

Sir Gilbert, as he received it, had just come in from a long ride across the wild moors that stretch away from Spa towards Han, and looked the picture of health, robust and fresh and ruddy. He glowed with bodily vigour; no suspense could kill him. Refusal under such circumstances was clearly impossible. He saw he must go, or resign his post at once. So, with an agitated heart, he wired acquiescence, took the next train to—Brussels and Calais, and caught the Dover boat just in time for acceptance. And now he was there to try Guy Waring for the murder of the man he himself had killed in The Tangle at Mambury,



CHAPTER XLII.

UNEXPECTED EVIDENCE.



When Sir Gilbert Gildersleeve left Spa, he left with a ruddy glow of recovered health on his bronzed red cheek; for in spite of anxiety and repentance and doubt, the man's iron frame would somehow still assert itself. When he took his seat on the bench in court that morning, he looked so haggard and ill with fatigue and remorse that even Elma Clifford herself pitied him. A hushed whisper ran round among the spectators below that the judge wasn't fit to try the case before him. And indeed he wasn't. For it was his own trial, not Guy Waring's, he was really presiding over.

He sat down in his place, a ghastly picture of pallid despair. The red colour had faded altogether from his wan, white cheeks. His eyes were dreamy and bloodshot with long vigil. His big hands trembled like a woman's as he opened his note-book. His mouth twitched nervously. So utter a collapse, in such a man as he was, seemed nothing short of pitiable to every spectator.

Counsel for the Crown stared him steadily in the face. Counsel for the Crown—Forbes-Ewing, Q.C.—was an old forensic enemy, who had fought many a hard battle against Gildersleeve, with scant interchange of courtesy, when both were members of the junior Bar together; but now Sir Gilbert's look moved even HIM to pity. "I think, my lord," the Q.C. suggested with a sympathetic simper, "your lordship's too ill to open the court to-day. Perhaps the proceedings had better be adjourned for the present."

"No, no," the judge answered, almost testily, shaking his sleeve with impatience. "I'll have no putting off for trifles in the court where I sit. There's a capital case to come on this morning. When a man's neck's at stake—when a matter of life and death's at issue—I don't like to keep any one longer in suspense than I absolutely need. Delay would be cruel."

As he spoke he lifted his eyes—and caught Elma Clifford's. The judge let his own drop again in speechless agony. Elma's never flinched. Neither gave a sign; but Elma knew, as, well as Sir Gilbert knew himself, it was his own life and death the judge was thinking of, and not Guy Waring's.

"As you will, my lord," counsel for the Crown responded demurely. "It was your lordship's convenience we all had at heart, rather than the prisoner's."

"Eh! What's that?" the judge said sharply, with a suspicious frown. Then he recovered himself with a start. For a moment he had half fancied that fellow, Forbes-Ewing, meant SOMETHING by what he said—meant to poke innuendoes at him. But, after all, it was a mere polite form. How frightened we all are, to be sure, when we know we're on our trial!

The opening formalities were soon got over, and then, amid a deep hush of breathless lips, Guy Waring, of Staple Inn, Holborn, gentleman, was put upon his trial for the wilful murder of Montague Nevitt, eighteen months before, at Mambury in Devon.

Guy, standing in the dock, looked puzzled and distracted rather than alarmed or terrified. His cheek was pale, to be sure, and his eyes were weary; but as Elma glanced from him hastily to the judge on the bench she had no hesitation in settling in her own mind which of the two looked most at that moment like a detected murderer before the faces of his accusers. Guy was calm and self-contained. Sir Gilbert's mute agony was terrible to behold. Yet, strange to say, no one else in court save Elma seemed to note it as she did. People saw the judge was ill, but that was all. Perhaps his wig and robes helped to hide the effect of conscious guilt—nobody suspects a judge of murder; perhaps all eyes were more intent on the prisoner.

Be that as it might, counsel for the Crown opened with a statement of what they meant to prove, set forth in the familiar forensic fashion. They didn't pretend the evidence against the accused was absolutely conclusive or overwhelming in character. It was inferential only, but not circumstantial—inferential in such a cumulative and convincing way as could leave no moral doubt on any intelligent mind as to the guilt of the prisoner. They would show that a clbse intimacy had long existed between the prisoner Waring and the deceased gentleman, Mr. Montague Nevitt. Witnesses would be called who would prove to the court that just before the murder this intimacy, owing to circumstances which could not fully be cleared up, had passed suddenly into intense enmity and open hatred. The landlord of the inn at Mambury, and other persons to be called, would speak to the fact that prisoner had followed his victim in hot blood into Devonshire, and had tracked him to the retreat where he was passing his holiday alone and incognito—had tracked him with every expression of indignant anger, and had uttered plain threats of personal violence towards him.

Nor was that all. It would be shown that on the afternoon of Waring's visit to Mambury, Mr. Nevitt, who possessed an intense love of nature in her wildest and most romantic moods—it's always counsel's cue, for the prosecution, to set the victim's character in the most amiable light, and so win the sympathy of the jury as against the accused—Mr. Nevitt, that close student of natural beauty, had strolled by himself down a certain woodland path, known as The Tangle, which led through the loneliest and leafiest quarter of Mambury Chase, along the tumbling stream described as the Mam-water. Ten minutes after he had passed the gate, a material witness would show them, the prisoner Waring presented himself, and pointedly asked whether his victim had already gone down the path before him. He was told that that was so. Thereupon the prisoner opened the gate, and followed excitedly. What happened next no living eye but the prisoner's ever saw. Montague Nevitt was not destined to issue from that wood alive. Two days later his breathless body was found, all stiff and stark, hidden among the brown bracken at the bottom of the dell, where the murderer no doubt had thrust it away out of his sight on that fatal afternoon in fear and trembling.

Half-way through the opening speech Sir Gilbert's heart beat fast and hard. He had never heard Forbes-Ewing open a case so well. The man would be hanged! He felt sure of it! He could see it! For a while the judge almost gloated over that prospect of release. What was Guy's life to him now, by the side of his wife's and Gwendoline's happiness? But as counsel uttered the words, "What happened next no living eye but the prisoner's ever saw," he looked hard at Guy. Not a quiver of remorse or of guilty knowledge passed over the young man's face. But Elma Clifford, for her part, looked at the judge on the bench. Their eyes met once more. Again Sir Gilbert's fell. Oh, heavens! how terrible! Even for Gwendoline's sake he could never stand this appalling suspense. But perhaps after all the prosecution might fail. There was still a chance left that the jury might acquit him.

So, torn by conflicting emotions, he sat there still, stiff and motionless in his seat as an Egyptian statue.

Then counsel went on to deal in greater detail with the question of motive. There were two motives the prosecution proposed to allege: first, the known enmity of recent date between the two parties, believed to have reference to some business dispute; and, secondly—here counsel dropped his voice to a very low key—he was sorry to suggest it; but the evidence bore it out—mere vulgar love of gain—the commonplace thirst after filthy lucre. They would bring witnesses to show that when Mr. Montague Nevitt was last seen alive, he was in possession of a pocket-book containing a very large large sum in Bank of England notes of high value; from the moment of his death that pocket-book had disappeared, and nobody knew what had since become of it. It was not upon the body when the body was found. And all their efforts to trace the missing notes, whose numbers were not known, had been unhappily unsuccessful.

Guy listened to all this impeachment in a dazed, dreamy way. He hardly knew what it meant. It appalled and chilled him. The web of circumstances was too thick for him to break. He couldn't understand it himself. And what was far worse, he could give no active assistance to his own lawyers on the question of the notes—which might be very important evidence against him—without further prejudicing his case by confessing the forgery. At all hazards, he was determined to keep that quiet now. Cyril had never spoken to a soul of that episode, and to speak of it, as things stood, would have been certain death to him. I would be to supply the one missing link of motive which the prosecution needed to complete their chain of cumulative evidence.

It was some comfort to him to think, however, that the secret was safe in Cyril's keeping. Cyril had all the remaining notes, still unchanged, in his possession; and the prosecution, knowing nothing of the forgery, or its sequel, had no clue at all as to where they came from.

But as for Sir Gilbert, he listened still with ever-deepening horror. His mind swayed to and fro between hope and remorse. They were making the man guilty, and Gwendoline would be saved! They were making the man guilty, and a gross wrong would be perpetrated! Great drops of sweat stood colder than ever on his burning brow. He couldn't have believed Forbes-Ewing could have done it so well. He was weaving a close web round an innocent man with consummate forensic skill and cunning.

The case went on to its second stage. Witnesses were called, and Guy listened to them dreamily. All of them bore out counsel's opening statement. Every man in court felt the evidence was going very hard against the prisoner. They'd caught the right man, that was clear—so the spectators opined. They'd proved it to the hilt. This fellow would swing for it.

At last the landlord of the Talbot Arms at Mambury shuffled slowly into the witness-box. He was a heavy, dull man, and he gave evidence as to Nevitt's stay under an assumed name—which counsel explained suggestively by the deceased gentleman's profound love of retirement —and as to Guy's angry remarks and evident indignation. But the most sensational part of all his evidence was that which related to the pocket-book Montague Nevitt was carrying at the time of his death, containing notes, he should say, for several hundred-pounds, "or it murt be thousands—and yet, again, it mustn't," which had totally disappeared since the day of the murder. Diligent search had been made for the pocket-book everywhere by the landlord and the police, but it had vanished into space, "leaving not a wrack behind," as junior counsel for the prosecution poetically phrased it.

At the words Cyril mechanically dived his hand into his pocket, as he had done a hundred times a day before, during these last eighteen months, to assure himself that that most incriminating and unwelcome object was still safely ensconced in its usual resting-place. Yes, there it was sure enough, as snug as ever! He sighed, and pulled his hand out again nervously, with a little jerk. Something came with it, that fell on the floor with a jingle by his neighbour's feet. Cyril turned crimson, then deadly pale. He snatched at the object; but his neighbour picked it up and examined it cursorily. Its flap had burst open with the force of the fall, and on the inside the finder read with astonishment, in very plain letters, the very name of the murdered man, "Montague Nevitt."

Cyril held out his hand to recover it impatiently. But the finder was too much taken back at his strange discovery to part with it so readily. It was full of money-Bank of England notes; and through the transparent paper of the outermost among them the finder could dimly read the words, "One hundred."

He rose in his place, and held the pocket-book aloft in his hand with a triumphant gesture. Cyril tried in vain to clutch at it. The witness turned round sharply, disturbed by this incident. "What's that?" the judge exclaimed, puckering his brows in disapprobation, and looking angrily towards the disturber.

"If you please, my lord," the innkeeper answered, letting his jaw drop slowly in almost speechless amazement, "that's the thing I was a-talking of: that's Mr. Nevitt's pocket-book."

"Hand it up," the judge said shortly, gazing hard with all his eyes at the mute evidence so tendered.

The finder handed it up without note or comment.

Sir Gilbert turned the book over in blank surprise. He was dumfoundered himself. For a minute or two he examined it carefully, inside and out. Yes; there was no mistake. It was really what they called it. "Montague Nevitt" was written in plain letters on the leather flap; within lay half-a-dozen engraved visiting-cards, a Foreign Office passport in Nevitt's name, and thirty Bank of England notes for one hundred pounds apiece. This was, indeed, a mystery!

"Where did it come from?" the judge asked, drawing a painfully deep breath, and handing it across to the jury.

And the finder answered, "If you please, my lord, the gentleman next to me pulled it out of his pocket."

"Who is he?" the judge inquired, with a sinking heart, for he himself knew perfectly well who was the unhappy possessor.

And a thrill of horror ran round the crowded court as Forbes-Ewing answered, in a very distinct voice, "Mr. Cyril Waring, my lord, the brother of the prisoner."



CHAPTER XLIII.

SIR GILBERT'S TEMPTATION.



Cyril felt all was up. Elma glanced at him trembling. This was horrible, inconceivable, inexplicable, fatal. The very stars in their courses seem to fight against Guy. Blind chance checkmated them. No hope was left now, save in Gilbert Gildersleeve's own sense of justice.

But Sir Gilbert Gildersleeve sat there, transfixed with horror. No answering gleam now shot through his dull, glazed eye. For he alone knew that whatever made the case against the prisoner look worse, made his own position each moment more awful and more intolerable.

Through the rest of the case, Cyril sat in his place like a stone figure. Counsel for the Crown generously abstained from putting him into the witness-box to give testimony against his brother. Or rather, they thought the facts themselves, as they had just come out in court, more telling for the jury than any formal evidence. The only other witness of importance was, therefore, the lad who had sat on the gate by the entrance to The Tangle. As he scrambled into the box Sir Gilbert's anxiety grew visibly deeper and more acute than ever. For the boy was the one person who had seen him at Mambury on the day of the murder; and on the boy depended his sole chance of being recognised. At Tavistock, eighteen months before, Sir Gilbert had left the cross-examination of this witness in the hands of a junior, and the boy hadn't noticed him, sitting down among the Bar with gown and wig on. But to-day, it was impossible the boy shouldn't see him; and if the boy should recognise him—why, then, Heaven help him.

The lad gave his evidence-in-chief with great care and deliberateness. He swore positively to Guy, and wasn't for a moment to be shaken in cross-examination. He admitted he had been mistaken at Tavistock, and confused the prisoner with Cyril—when he saw one of them apart—but now that he saw 'em both together before his eyes at once, why, he could take his solemn oath as sure as fate upon him. Guy's counsel failed utterly to elicit anything of importance, except—and here Sir Gilbert's face grew whiter than ever—except that another gentleman whom the lad didn't know had asked at the gate about the path, and gone round the other way as if to meet Mr. Nevitt.

"What sort of a gentleman?" the cross-examiner inquired, clutching at this last straw as a mere chance diversion.

"Well, a vurry big zart o' a gentleman," witness answered, unabashed. "A vine vigger o' a man. Jest such another as thik 'un with the wig ther."

As he spoke he stared hard at the judge, a good scrutinizing stare. Sir Gilbert quailed, and glanced instinctively, first at the boy, and then at Elma. Not a spark of intelligence shone in the lad's stolid eyes. But Elma's were fixed upon him with a serpentine glare of awful fascination. "Thou art the man," they seemed to say to him mutely. Sir Gilbert, in his awe, was afraid to look at them. They made him wild with terror, yet they somehow fixed him. Try as he would to keep his own from meeting them, they attracted him irresistibly.

A ripple, of faint laughter ran lightly through the court at the undisguised frankness of the boy's reply. The judge repressed it sternly.

"Oh, he was just such another one as his lordship, was he?" counsel repeated, pressing the lad hard. "Now, are you quite sure you remember all the people you saw that day? Are you quite sure the other man who asked about passers-by wasn't—for example—the judge himself who's sitting here?"

Sir Gilbert glanced up with a quick, suspicious air. It was only a shot at random—the common advocate's trick in trying to confuse a witness over questions of identity; but to Sir Gilbert, under the circumstances, it was inexpressibly distressing. "Well, it murt 'a been he," the lad answered, putting his head on one side, and surveying the judge closely with prolonged attention. "Thik un 'ad just such another pair o' 'ands as his lordship do 'ave. It murt 'a been his lordship 'urself as is zitting there."

"This goes quite beyond the bounds of decency," Sir Gilbert murmured faintly, with a vain endeavour to hold his hands on the desk in an unconcerned attitude. "Have the kindness, Mr. Walters, to spare the Bench. Attend to your examination. Observations of that sort are wholly uncalled for."

But the boy, once started, was not so easily repressed. "Why, it was his lordship," he went on, scanning the judge still harder. "I do mind his vurry voice. It was 'im, no doubt about it. I've zeed a zight o' people, since I zeed 'im that day, but I do mind his voice, and I do mind his 'ands, and I do mind his ve-ace the zame as if it wur yesterday. Now I come to look, blessed if it wasn't his lordship!"

Guy's counsel smiled a triumphant smile. He had carried his point. He had confused the witness. This showed how little reliance could be placed upon the boy's evidence as to personal identity! He'd identify anybody who happened to be suggested to him! But Sir Gilbert's face grew yet more deadly pale. For he saw at a glance this was no accident or mistake; the boy really remembered him! And Elma's steadfast eyes looked him through and through, with that irresistible appeal, still more earnestly than ever.

Sir Gilbert breathed again. He had been recognised to no purpose. Even this positive identification fell flat upon everybody.

At last the examination and cross-examination were finished, and Guy's counsel began his hopeless task of unravelling this tangled mass of suggestion and coincidence. He had no witnesses to call; the very nature of the case precluded that. All he could do was to cavil over details, to point out possible alternatives, to lay stress upon the absence of direct evidence, and to ask that the jury should give the prisoner the benefit of the doubt, if any doubt at all existed in their minds as to his guilt or innocence. Counsel had meant when he first undertook the case to lay great stress also on the presumed absence of motive; but, after the fatal accident which resulted in the disclosure of Montague Nevitt's pocket-book, any argument on that score would have been worse than useless. Counsel elected rather to pass the episode by in discreet silence, and to risk everything on the uncertainty of the actual encounter.

At last he sat down, wiping his brow in despair, after what he felt himself to be a most feeble performance.

Then Sir Gilbert began, and in a very tremulous and failing voice summed briefly up the whole of the evidence.

Men who remember Gildersleeve's old blustering manner stood aghast at the timidity with which the famous lawyer delivered himself on this, the first capital charge ever brought before him. He reminded the jury, in very solemn and almost warning tones, that where a human life was at stake, mere presumptive evidence should always carry very little weight with it. And the evidence here was all purely presumptive. The prosecution had shown nothing more than a physical possibility that the prisoner at the bar might have committed the murder. There was evidence of animus, it was true; but that evidence was weak; there was partial identification; but that identification lay open to the serious objection that all the persons who now swore to Guy Waring's personality had sworn just as surely and confidently before to his brother Cyril's. On the whole, the judge summed up strongly in Guy's favour. He wiped his clammy brow and looked appealingly at the bar. As the jury would hope for justice themselves, let them remember to mete out nothing but strict justice to the accused person who now stood trembling in the dock before them.

All the court stood astonished. Could this be Gildersleeve? Atkins would never have summed up like that. Atkins would have gone in point-blank for hanging him. And everybody thought Gildersleeve would hang with the best. Nobody had suspected him till then of any womanly weakness about capital punishment. There was a solemn hush as the judge ended. Then everybody saw the unhappy man was seriously ill. Great streams of sweat trickled slowly down his brow. His eyes stared in front of him. His mouth twitched horribly. He looked like a person on the point of apoplexy. The prisoner at the bar gazed hard at him and pitied him.

"He's dying himself, and he wants to go out with a clear conscience at last," some one suggested in a low voice at the barristers' table. The explanation served. It was whispered round the court in a hushed undertone that the judge to-day was on his very last legs, and had summed up accordingly. Late in life, he had learned to show mercy, as he hoped for it.