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.