Six--thousand--pounds of Cyril's money! Not that for one moment he
suspected Nevitt. Guy Waring was too innocent to suspect anybody.
But as he woke up more fully now to the nature of his own act,
a horrible sense of guilt and pollution crept slowly over him. He
put his hand ito his forehead. Cold sweat stood in clammy small
drops upon his brow. Bit by bit, the hateful truth dawned clearly
upon him. Nevitt had lured him by strange means, he knew not how,
into hateful crime--into a disgraceful conspiracy. Word by word,
the self-accusing sentence framed itself upon his lips.
He spoke it out, aloud: "Why--this--is forgery!"
Dazzled and stunned by the intensity of that awful awaking from
some weird possession or suggestion of evil by a stronger mind, Guy
Waring began to walk on in a feverish fashion, fast, fast, oh, so
fast, not knowing where he went, but conscious only that he must
keep moving, lest an accusing conscience should gnaw his very heart
out.
Whither, he hadn't as yet the faintest idea. His whole being for
the moment was centred and summed up in that unspeakable remorse.
He had done a great wrong. He had made himself a felon. And now,
in the first recoil of his revolted nature, he must go after the
man who held the evidences of his guilt, and by force or persuasion
demand them at once from him. Those notes were Cyril's. He must
get them. He must get them.
Possessed by this one idea, with devouring force, but still in a
very nebulous and hazy form, Guy began walking towards the Strand
and the Embankment, at the hot top of his speed, to get the notes
back--at Montague Nevitt's chambers. He had walked with fiery
zeal in that wrong direction for nearly a mile, his heart burning
within him all the way, and his brain in a whirl, before it began
to strike him, in a flash of common sense, that Montague Nevitt
wouldn't be there at all. He had driven off to the office. Guy
clapped his hand to his forehead once more, in an agony of remorse.
Great heavens, what folly! He had heard him tell the cabman the
address himself--"127, Knatchbull Street, Cheapside."
Even now he hadn't sense enough to hail a cab and go after him. His
faculties were still numbed and entranced by that horrible spell
of Montague Nevitt's eye. He had but one thought--to walk on, walk
hastily. He tramped along the streets in the direction of Cheapside,
straining every muscle to arrive at the office before Nevitt had
parted with Cyril's six thousand--but he never even thought of
saving the precious moments by driving the distance between instead
of walking it. Montague Nevitt's personality still weighed down
half his brain, and rendered his mind almost childish or imbecile.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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