Cyril’s last hope was gone. Guy himself admitted it!
“How I came to do it,” the letter said, “I’ve no idea myself. A sudden suggestion—a strange, unaccountable impulse—a prompting, as it were, pressed upon me from without, and almost before I knew, the crime was committed.”
Cyril bent his head low upon his knees with shame. He never could hold up that head henceforth. No further doubt or hesitation remained. He knew the whole truth. Guy was indeed a murderer.
He steeled himself for the worst, and read the letter through with a superhuman effort. It almost choked him to read. The very consecutiveness and coherency of the sentences seemed all but incredible under such awful circumstances. A murderer, red-handed, to speak of his crime so calmly as that! And then, too, this undying anger expressed and felt, even after death, against his victim Nevitt! Cyril couldn’t understand how any man—least of all his own brother—could write such words about the murdered man whose body was then lying all silent and cold, under the open sky, among the bracken at Mambury.
And once more, this awful clue of the dead man’s pocket-book! Those accursed notes! That hateful sum of money! How could Guy venture to speak of it all in such terms as those—the one palpable fact that indubitably linked him with that cold-blooded murder. “The three thousand sent herewith I recovered, almost by a miracle, from that false creature’s grasp, under extraordinary circumstances, and I return them now, in proof of the fact, in Montague Nevitt’s own pocket-book, which I’m sure you’ll recognise as soon as you look at it.”
Cyril saw it all now beyond the shadow of a doubt. He reconstructed the whole sad tale. He was sure he understood it. But to understand it was hardly even yet to believe it. Guy had lost heavily in the Rio Negro Mines, as the prosecution declared; in an evil hour he’d been cajoled into forging Cyril’s name for six thousand. Montague Nevitt had in some way misappropriated the stolen sum. Guy had pursued him in a sudden white-heat of fury, had come up with him unawares, had killed him in his rage, and now calmly returned as much as he could recover of that fateful and twice-stolen money to Cyril. It was all too horrible, but all too true. In a wild ferment of remorse for his brother’s sin, the unhappy painter sat down at once and penned a letter of abject self-humiliation to Elma Clifford.
“ELMA,-I said to you last night that I could never marry you till I had clearly proved my brother Guy’s innocence. Well, I said what I can never conceivably do. Since returning to town I received a letter from Guy himself. What it contained I must never tell you, for Guy’s own sake. But what I MUST tell you is this—I can never again see you. Guy and I are so nearly one, in every nerve and fibre of our being, that whatever he may have done is to me almost as if I myself had done it. You will know how terrible a thing it is for me to write these words, but for YOUR sake I can’t refrain from writing them. Think no more of me. I am not worthy of you. I will think of you as long as I live.
“Your ever devoted and heart-broken
“CYRIL.”
He folded the letter, and sent it off to the temporary address at the West-End where Elma had told him that she and her mother would spend the night in London. Very late that evening a ring came at the bell. Cyril ran to the door. It was a boy with a telegram. He opened it, and read it with breathless excitement.