The eminent Q.C. let the paper drop from his huge red hands in the intensity of his surprise, while his jaw fell in unison at so startling and almost incredible a piece of intelligence. “Nevitt knows all!” he exclaimed, half incredulous. “He means to ruin us! And he told this to Gwendoline! Gone down to Mambury! Oh no, Minnie, impossible! You must have made some mistake. What did she say exactly? Did she mention Mambury?”
“She said it exactly as I’ve said it now to you,” Mrs. Gildersleeve persisted with a stony stare. “He’s gone down to Devonshire, she said; to the borders of Dartmoor, on a hunt after the records; to a place in the wilds by the name of Mambury. Those were her very words. I could stake my life on each syllable. I give them to you precisely as she gave them to me.”
Mr. Gildersleeve gazed across at her with the countenance which had made so many a nervous witness quake at the Old Bailey. “Are you QUITE sure of that, Minnie?” he asked, in his best cross-examining tone. “Quite sure she said Mambury, all of her own accord? Quite sure you didn’t suggest it to her, or supply the name, or give her a hint of its whereabouts, or put her a leading question?”
“Is it likely I’d suggest it to her?” the meekest of women answered, aroused to retort for once, and with her face like a sheet. “Is it likely I’d tell her? Is it likely I’d give my own girl the clue? She said it all of herself, I tell you, without one word of prompting. She said it just as I repeated it—to a place in the wilds by the name of Mambury.”
Gilbert Gildersleeve whistled inaudibly to himself. ‘Twas his way when he felt himself utterly nonplussed. This was very strange news. He didn’t really understand it. But he rose and confronted his wife anxiously. That overbearing big man was evidently stirred by this untoward event to the very depths of his nature.
“Then Gwennie knows all!” he cried, the blood rushing purple into his ruddy flushed cheeks. “The wretch! The brute! He must have told her everything!”
“Oh, Gilbert,” his wife answered, sinking into a chair in her horror, “even HE couldn’t do that—not to my own very daughter! And he didn’t do it, I’m sure. He didn’t dare—coward as he is, he couldn’t be quite so cowardly. She doesn’t guess what it means. She thinks it’s something, I believe, about Granville Kelmscott. She’s in love with young Kelmscott, as I told you long ago, and everything to her mind takes some colour from that fancy. I don’t think it ever occurred to her, from what she says, this has anything at all to do with you or me, Gilbert.”
The Q.C. reflected. He saw at once he was in a tight corner. That boisterous man, with the burly big hands, looked quite subdued and crestfallen now. He could hardly have snubbed the most unassuming junior. This was a terrible thing, indeed, for a man so unscrupulous and clever as Montague Nevitt to have wormed out of the registers. How he could ever have wormed it out Gilbert Gildersleeve hadn’t the faintest idea, Why, who on earth could have shown him the entry of that fatal marriage—Minnie’s first marriage—the marriage with that wretch who died in Portland prison—the marriage that was celebrated at St. Mary’s, at Mambury? He couldn’t for a moment conceive, for nobody but themselves, he fondly imagined, had ever identified Mrs. Gilbert Gildersleeve, the wife of the eminent Q.C., with that unhappy Mrs. Read, the convict’s widow. The convict’s widow. Ah, there was the rub. For she was really a widow in name alone when Gilbert Gildersleeve married her.
And Montague Nevitt, that human ferret, with his keen sharp eyes, and his sleek polite ways, had found it all out in spite of them—had hunted up the date of Read’s death and their marriage, and had bragged how he was going down to Mambury to prove it!
All the Warings and Reads always got married at Widdicombe or Mambury. There were lots of them on the books there, that was one comfort, anyhow. He’d have a good search to find his needle in such a pottle of hay. But to think the fellow should have, had the double-dyed cruelty to break the shameful secret first of all to Gwendoline! That was his vile way of trying to force a poor girl into an unwilling consent. Gilbert Gildersleeve lifted his burly big hands in front of his capacious waistcoat, and pressed them together angrily. If only he had that rascal’s throat well between them at that moment! He’d crush the fellow’s windpipe till he choked him on the spot, though he answered for it before the judges of assize to-morrow!