"Was mine too, Waring. Yes; I couldn't bear to die without telling
you that. And I tell it now to you. You two are the heirs of
the Tilgate estates. And the unknown person who paid six thousand
pounds to Cyril, just before you left England, was your father and
mine--Colonel Henry Kelmscott."
Guy bent over him for a few seconds in speechless surprise. Words
failed him at first. "How do you know all this, Kelmscott?" he said
at last faintly.
Granville told him in as few words as possible--for indeed he was
desperately weak and ill--by what accident he had discovered his
father's secret. But he told him only what he knew himself. For, of
course, he was ignorant as yet of the Colonel's seizure and sudden
death on the very day after they had sailed from England.
Guy listened to it all in profound silence. It was a strange,
and for him a momentous tale. Then he said at last, as Granville
finished, "And you never told me this all these long months,
Kelmscott."
"I always meant to tell you, Guy," his half-brother answered, in
a sudden fit of penitence. "I always meant in the end you and your
brother Cyril should come into your own at Tilgate as you ought.
I was only waiting--"
"Till you'd realized enough to make good some part of your personal
loss," Guy suggested, not unkindly.
"Oh no," Granville answered, flushing up at the suggestion. "I
wasn't waiting for that. Don't think me so mercenary. I was waiting
for YOU, in your turn to extend to ME your own personal confidence.
You know, Guy," he went on, dropping into a still more hushed
and solemn undertone, "I saw an evening paper the night we left
Plymouth--"
"Oh, I know, I know," Guy cried, interrupting him, with a very
pale face. "Don't speak to me of that. I can't bear to think of
it. Kelmscott, I was mad when I did that deed. I wasn't myself. I
acted under somebody else's compulsion and influence. The man had
a sort of hypnotic power over my will, I believe. I couldn't help
doing whatever he ordered me. It was he who suggested it. It was
he that did it. And it's he who was really and truly guilty."
"And who was that man?" Granville Kelmscott asked with some little
curiosity.
"There's no reason I shouldn't tell you," Guy answered, "now we've
once broken the ice; and I'm glad in my heart, I must say, that
we've broken it. For a year and a half, day and night, that barrier
has been raised between us always, and I've longed to get rid of
it. But I was afraid to speak of it to you, and you to me! Well,
the man, if you must know, was Montague Nevitt!"
Granville Kelmscott looked up at him in credulous surprise. But he
was too ill and weak to ask the meaning of this riddle. Montague
Nevitt! What on earth could Waring mean by that? How on earth could
Montague Nevitt have influenced and directed him in assaulting and
murdering Montague Nevitt?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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