CHAPTER XXXIII. — TIME FLIES.
Eighteen months passed away in England, and nothing more was heard of the two fugitives to Africa. Lady Emily’s cup was very full indeed. On the self-same day she learned of her husband’s death and her son’s mysterious and unaccountable disappearance. From that moment forth, he was to her as if dead. After Granville left, no letter or news of him, direct or indirect, ever reached Tilgate. It was all most inexplicable. He had disappeared into space, and no man knew of him.
Cyril, too, had now almost given up hoping for news of Guy. Slowly the conviction forced itself deeper and still deeper upon his mind, in spite of Elma, that Guy was really Montague Nevitt’s murderer. Else how account for Guy’s sudden disappearance, and for the fact that he never even wrote home his whereabouts? Nay, Guy’s letter itself left no doubt upon his mind. Cyril went through life now oppressed continually with the terrible burden of being a murderer’s brother.
And indeed everybody else—except Elma Clifford—implicitly shared that opinion with him. Cyril was sure the unknown benefactor shared it too, for Guy’s six thousand pounds were never paid in to his credit—as indeed how could they, since Colonel Kelmscott, who had promised to pay them, died before receiving the balance of the purchase money for the Dowlands estate? Cyril slank through the world, then, weighed down by his shame, for Guy and he were each other’s doubles, and he always had a deep underlying conviction that, as Guy was in any particular, so also in the very fibre of his nature he himself was.
Everybody else, except Elma Clifford; but in spite of all, Elma still held out firm, in her intuitive way, in favour of Guy’s innocence. She knew it, she said; and there the matter dropped. And she knew quite equally, in her own firm mind, that Gilbert Gildersleeve was the real murderer.
Gilbert Gildersleeve, meanwhile, had gone up a step or two higher in the social scale. He had been promoted to the bench on the first vacancy, as all the world had long expected; but, strange to say, he took it far more modestly than all the world had ever anticipated. Indeed, before he was made a judge, everybody said he’d be intolerable in the ermine. He was blustering and bullying enough, in all conscience, as a mere Queen’s Counsel; but when he came to preside in a court of his own, his insolence would surpass even the wonted insolence of our autocratic British justices. In this, however, everybody was mistaken.
A curious change had of late come over Gilbert Gildersleeve. The big, bullying lawyer was growing nervous and diffident, where of old he had been coarse and self-assertive and blustering. He was beginning at times almost to doubt his own absolute omniscience and absolute wisdom. He was prepared half to admit that under certain circumstances a prisoner might possibly be in the right, and that all crimes alike did not necessarily deserve the hardest sentence the law of the land allowed him to allot them. Habitual criminals even began, after a while, to express a fervent hope, as assizes approached, they might be tried by old Gildersleeve: “Gilly,” they said, “gave a cove a chance”: he wasn’t “one of these ‘ere reg’lar ‘anging judges, like Sir ‘Enery Atkins.”
During those eighteen months, too, Cyril tried, as far as he could, from a stern sense of duty, to see as little as possible of Elma Clifford. He loved Elma still—that goes without saying—more devotedly than ever; and Elma’s profound belief that Cyril’s brother couldn’t possibly have committed so grave a crime touched his heart to the core by its womanly confidence. There’s nothing a man likes so much as being trusted. But he had declared in the first flush of his horror and despair that he would never again ask Elma to marry him till the cloud that hung over Guy’s character had been lifted and dissipated; and now that, month after month, no news came from Guy and all hope seemed to fade, lie felt it would be wrong of him even to see her or speak with her.
On that question however, Elma herself had a voice as well. Man proposes; woman decides. And though Elma for her part had quite equally made up her mind never to marry Cyril, with that nameless terror of expected madness hanging ever over her head, she felt, on the other hand, her very loyalty to Cyril and to Cyril’s brother imperatively demanded that she should still see him often, and display marked friendship towards him as openly as possible. She wanted the world to see plainly for itself that so far as this matter of Guy’s reputation was concerned, if Cyril, for his part, wanted to marry her, she, on her side, would be quite ready to marry Cyril.
So she insisted on meeting him whenever she could, and on writing to him openly from time to time very affectionate notes—those familiar notes we all know so well and prize so dearly—full of hopeless love and unabated confidence. Yes, good Mr. Stockbroker who do me the honour to read my simple tale, smile cynically if you will! You pretend to care nothing for these little sentimentalities; but you know very well in your own heart, you’ve a bundle of them at home, very brown and yellow, locked up in your escritoire; and you’d let New Zealand Fours sink to the bottom of the Indian Ocean, and Egyptian Unified go down to zero, before ever you’d part with a single faded page of them.