Thinking the matter over continually with himself, however, he came in the end to the natural conclusion that one explanation alone would fit all the facts. He was not his father's eldest son at all.

Colonel Kelmscott must have been married to some one else before his marriage with Lady Emily. That some one else's son was the real heir of Tilgate. And it was to him that his father, in his pa.s.sionate penitence, proposed, after many years, to do one-sided justice. Now Granville Kelmscott, though a haughty and somewhat head-strong fellow, after the fashion of his race, was a young man of principle and of honour. The moment this hideous doubt occurred to his mind, he couldn't rest in his bed till he had cleared it all up and settled it for ever, one way or the other. If Tilgate wasn't his, by law and right, he wanted none of it. If his father was trying to buy off the real heir to the estate with a pitiful pittance, in order to preserve the ill-gotten remainder for Lady Emily's son, why, Granville for his part would be no active party to such a miserable compromise. If some other man was the Colonel's lawful heir, let that other man take the property and enjoy it; but he, Granville Kelmscott, would go forth upon the world, an honest adventurer, to seek his fortune with his own right hand wherever he might find it.

Still, he could take no active step, on the other hand, to hunt up the truth about the Colonel's real or supposed first marriage.

For here an awful dilemma blocked the way before him. If the Colonel had married before, and if by that former marriage he had a son or sons--how could Granville be sure the supposed first wife was dead before the second was married? And supposing, for a moment, she was not dead--supposing his father had been even more criminal and more unjust than he at first imagined--how could he take the initiative himself in showing that his own mother, Lady Emily Kelmscott, was no wife at all in the sight of the law? that some other woman was his father's lawful consort? The bare possibility of such an issue was too horrible for any son on earth to face undismayed. So, tortured and distracted by his divided duty, Granville Kelmscott shrank alike from action or inaction.

In the midst of such doubts and difficulties, however, one duty shone out clear as day before him. Till the mystery was cleared up, till the problem was solved, he must see no more of Gwendoline Gildersleeve. He had engaged himself to her as the heir of Tilgate.

She had accepted him under that guise, and looked forward to an early and happy marriage. Now, all was changed. He was, or might be, a beggar and an outcast. To be sure, he knew Gwendoline loved him for himself; but how could he marry her if he didn't even know he had anything of his own in the world to marry upon? The park and fallow deer had been a part of himself; without them, he felt he was hardly even a Kelmscott. It was his plain duty, now, for Gwendoline's sake, to release her from her promise to a man who might perhaps be penniless, and who couldn't even feel sure he was the lawful son of his own father. And yet--for Lady Emily's sake--he mustn't hint, even to Gwendoline, the real reason which moved him to offer her this release. He must throw himself upon her mercy, without cause a.s.signed, and ask her for the time being to have faith in him and to believe him.

So, a day or two after the interview with his father in the library, the self-disinherited heir of Tilgate took the path through the glade that led into the dell beyond the boundary fence--that dell which had once been accounted a component part of Tilgate Park, but which Gilbert Gildersleeve had proved, in his cold-blooded doc.u.mentary legal way, to belong in reality to the grounds of Woodlands. It was in the dell that Granville sometimes ran up against Gwendoline. He sat down on the broken ledge of ironstone that overhung the little brook. It was eleven o'clock gone. By eleven o'clock, three mornings in the week, chance--pure chance--the patron G.o.d of lovers, brought Gwendoline into the dell to meet him.

Presently, a light footfall rang soft upon the path, and next moment a tall and beautiful girl, with a wealth of auburn hair, and a bright colour in her cheeks, tripped lightly down the slope, as if strolling through the wood in maiden meditation, fancy free, unexpecting any one.

"What, you here, Mr. Kelmscott?" she exclaimed, as she saw him, her pink cheek deepening as she spoke to a still profounder crimson.

"Yes, I'm here, Gwendoline," Granville Kelmscott answered, with a smile of recognition at her maidenly pretence of an undesigned coincidence. "And I'm here, to say the truth, because I quite expected this morning to meet you."

He took her hand gravely. Gwendoline let her eyes fall modestly on the ground, as if some warmer greeting were more often bestowed between them. The young man blushed with a certain manly shame.

"No, not to-day, dear," he said, with an effort, as she held her cheek aside, half courting and half deprecating the expected kiss.

"Oh, Gwendoline, I don't know how to begin. I don't know how to say it. But I've got very sad news for you--news that I can't bear to break--that I can't venture to explain--that I don't even properly understand myself. I must throw myself upon your faith. I must just ask you to trust me."

Gwendoline let him seat her, unresisting, upon the ledge by his side, and her cheek grew suddenly ashy pale, as she answered with a gasp, forgetting the "Mr. Kelmscott" at this sudden leap into the stern realities of life, "Why, Granville, what do you mean?

You know I can trust you. You know, whatever it may be, I believe you implicitly."

The young man took her hand in his with a tender pressure. It was a terrible message to have to deliver. He bungled and blundered on, with many twists and turns, through some inarticulate attempt at an indefinite explanation. It wasn't that he didn't love her--oh, devotedly, eternally, she must know that well; she never could doubt it. It wasn't that any shadow had arisen between him and her, it wasn't anything he could speak about, or anything she must say to any soul on earth--oh, for his mother's sake, he hoped and trusted she would religiously keep his secret inviolate! But something had happened to him within the last few days--something unspeakable, indefinite, uncertain, vague, yet very full of the most dreadful possibilities; something that might make him unable to support a wife; something that at least must delay or postpone for an unknown time the long-hoped-for prospect of his claiming her and marrying her. Some day, perhaps--he broke off suddenly, and looked with a wistful look into her deep grey eyes. His resolution failed him.

"One kiss," he said, "Gwendoline!" His voice was choking. The beautiful girl, turning towards him with a wild sob, fell, yielding herself on his breast, and cried hot tears of joy at that evident sign that, in spite of all he said, he still really loved her.

They sat there long, hand in hand, and eye on eye, talking it all over, as lovers will, with infinite delays, yet getting no nearer towards a solution either way. Gwendoline, for her part, didn't care, of course--what true woman does?--whether Granville was the heir of Tilgate or not; she would marry him all the more, she said, if he were a penniless n.o.body. All she wanted was to love him and be near him. Let him marry her now, marry her to-day, and then go where he would in the world to seek his livelihood. But Granville, poor fellow, alarmed at the bare suggestion--for his mother's sake--that Tilgate might really not be his, checked her at once in her outburst with a grave, silent look; he was still, he said calmly, the inheritor of Tilgate. It wasn't that. At least, not as she took it. He didn't know precisely what it was himself. She must have faith in him and trust him. She must wait and see. In the end, he hoped, he would come back and marry her.

And Gwendoline made answer, with many tears, that she knew it was so, and that she loved him and trusted him. So, after sitting there long, hand locked in hand, and heart intent on heart, the two young people rose at last to go, protesting and vowing their mutual love on either side, as happy and as miserable in their divided lives as two young people in all England that moment. Over and over again they kissed and said good-bye; then they stood with one another's fingers clasped hard in their own, unwilling to part, and unable to loose them. After that, they kissed again, and declared once more they were broken-hearted, and could never leave one another. But still, Granville added, half aside, he must make up his mind not to see Gwendoline again--honour demanded that sacrifice--till he could come at last a rich man to claim her. Meanwhile, she was free; and he--he was ever hers, devotedly, whole-souledly. But they were no longer engaged. He was hers in heart only. Let her try to forget him. He could never forget her.

And Gwendoline, sobbing and tearful, but believing him implicitly, retreated with slow steps, looking back at each turn of the zigzag path, and sending the ghosts of dead kisses from her finger-tips to greet him.

Below in the dell Granville stood still, and watched her depart in breathless silence. Then, in an agony of despair, he flung himself down on the ground and burst into tears, and sobbed like a child over his broken daydream.

Gwendoline, coming back to make sure, saw him lying and sobbing so; and, woman-like, felt compelled to step down just one minute to comfort him. Granville in turn refused her proffered comfort--it was better so--he mustn't listen to her any more; he must steel himself to say No; he must remember it was dishonourable of him to drag a delicately nurtured girl into a penniless marriage. Then they kissed once more and made it all up again; and they sobbed and wept as before, and broke it off for ever; and they said good-bye for the very last time; and they decided they must never meet till Granville came back; and they hoped they would sometimes catch just a glimpse of one another in the outer world, and whatever the other one said or did, they would each in their hearts be always true to their first great love; and they were more miserable still, and they were happier than they had ever been in their lives before; and they parted at last, with a desperate effort, each perfectly sure of the other's love, and each vowing in soul they would never, never see one another again, but each, for all that, perfectly certain that some day or other they would be husband and wife, though Tilgate and the wretched little fallow deer should sink, unwept, to the bottom of the ocean.

CHAPTER XIII.

BUSINESS FIRST.

The manager at Messrs. Drummond, Coutts and Barclay's, Limited, received Colonel Kelmscott with distinguished consideration.

A courteous, conciliatory sort of man, that manager, with his close-shaven face and his spotless shirt-front.

"Five minutes, my dear sir?" he exclaimed, with warmth, motioning his visitor blandly into the leather-covered chair. "Half an hour, if you wish it. We always have leisure to receive our clients. Any service we can render them, we're only too happy."

"But this is a very peculiar bit of business," Colonel Kelmscott answered, humming and hawing with obvious hesitation. "It isn't quite in the regular way of banking, I believe. Perhaps, indeed, I ought rather to have put it into the hands of my solicitor. But, even if you can't manage the thing yourself, you may be able to put me in the way of finding out how best I can get it managed elsewhere."

The manager bowed. His smile was a smile of genuine satisfaction.

Colonel Kelmscott of Tilgate was in a most gracious humour.

The manager, with deference, held himself wholly at his client's disposition.

So the Colonel proceeded to unfold his business. There were two young men, now knocking about town, of the names of Guy and Cyril Waring--the one a journalist, the other a painter--and they had rooms in Staple Inn, Holborn, which would doubtless form a sufficient clue by which to identify them. Colonel Kelmscott desired un.o.btrusively to know where these young men banked--if indeed they were in a position to keep an account; and when that was found out, he wished Messrs.

Drummond, Coutts and Barclay, Limited, to place a sum of money at their bankers to their credit, without mentioning the name of the person so placing it, as well as to transmit to them a sealed envelope, containing instructions as to the use to be made of the money in question.

The manager nodded a cautious acquiescence. To place the money to the credit of the two young men, indeed, would be quite in their way. But to send the sealed envelope, without being aware of its contents, or the nature of the business on which it was despatched, would be much less regular. Perhaps the Colonel might find some other means of managing without their aid that portion of the business arrangement.

The Colonel, for his part, fell in readily enough with this modest point of view. It amply sufficed for him if the money were paid to the young men's credit, and a receipt, forwarded to him in due course, under cover of a number, to the care of the bankers.

"Very well," the manager answered, rubbing his hands contentedly.

"Our confidential clerk will settle all that for you. A most sagacious person, our confidential clerk. No eyes, no ears, no tongue for anything but our clients' interests."

The Colonel smiled, and sat a little longer, giving further details as the precise amount he wished sent, and the particular way he wished to send it--the whole sum to be, in fact, twelve thousand pounds, amount of the purchase money of the Dowlands farms, whereof only six thousand had as yet been paid down; and that six thousand he wished to place forthwith to the credit of Cyril Waring, the painter. The remaining six thousand, to be settled, as agreed, in five weeks' time, he would then make over under the self-same conditions to the other brother, Guy Waring, the journalist. It had gone a trifle too cheap, that land at Dowlands, the Colonel opined; but still, in days like these he was very glad, indeed, to find a purchaser for the place at anything like its value.

"I think a Miss Ewes was the fortunate bidder, wasn't she?" the manager asked, just to make a certain decent show of interest in his client's estate.

"Yes, Miss Elma Ewes of Kenilworth," the Colonel answered, letting loose for a moment his tongue, that unruly member. "She's the composer, you know--writes songs and dances; remotely connected with Reginald Clifford, the man who was Governor of some West Indian Dutch-oven--St. Kitts, I think, or Antigua--he lives down our way, and he's a neighbour of mine at Tilgate. Or rather she's connected with Mrs. Clifford, the Governor's wife, who was one of the younger branch, a Miss Ewes of Worthing, daughter of the Ewes who was Dean of Dorchester. Elma's been a family name for years with all the lot of Eweses, good, bad, or indifferent. Came down to them, don't you know, from that Roumanian ancestress."

"Indeed," the manager answered, now beginning to be really interested--for the Cliffords were clients too, and it behoves a banker to know everything about everybody's business. "So Mrs.

Clifford had an ancestress who was a Roumanian, had she? Well, I've noticed at times her complexion looked very southern and gipsy-like--distinctly un-English."

"Oh, they call it Roumanian," Colonel Kelmscott went on in a confidential tone, roping his white moustache, and growing more and more conversational; "they call it Roumanian, because it sounds more respectable; but I believe, if you go right down to the very bottom of the thing, it was much more like some kind of Oriental gipsy. Sir Michael Ewes, the founder of the house, in George the Second's time, was amba.s.sador for awhile at Constantinople. He began life, indeed, I believe, as a Turkey merchant. Well, at Pera one day, so the story goes--you'll find it all in Horace Walpole's diary--he picked up with this dark-skinned gipsy-woman, who was a wonderful creature in her way, a sort of mesmeric sorceress, who belonged to some tribe of far eastern serpent charmers. It seems that women of this particular tribe were regularly trained by the men to be capering priestesses--or fortune-tellers, if you like--who performed some extraordinary sacred antics of a mystical kind, much after the fashion of the howling dervishes. However that may be, Sir Michael, at any rate, pacing the streets of Pera, saw the woman that she was pa.s.sing fair, and fell in love with her outright at some dervish entertainment. But being a very well-behaved old man, combining a liking for Orientals with a British taste for the highest respectability, he had the girl baptized and made into a proper Christian first; and then he married her off-hand and brought her home with him as my Lady Ewes to England. She was presented at Court, to George the Second; and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu stood her sponsor on the occasion."

"But how did it all turn out?" the manager asked, with an air of intelligent historical interest.

"Turn out? Well, it turned out in a thumping big family of thirteen children," the Colonel answered; "most of whom, happily for the father, died young, But the five who survived, and who married at last into very good connections, all had one peculiarity, which they transmitted to all their female descendants. Very odd these hereditary traits, to be sure. Very singular! Very singular!"

"Ah, to be sure," the manager answered, turning over a pile of letters. "And what was the hereditary trait handed down, as you say, in the family of the Roumanian lady?"

"Why, in the first place," the Colonel continued, leaning back in his chair, and making himself perfectly comfortable, "all the girls of the Ewes connection, to the third and fourth generation, have olive-brown complexions, creamy and soft, but clear as crystal.

Then again, they've all got most extraordinary intuition--a perfectly marvellous gift of reading faces. By George, sir," the Colonel exclaimed, growing hot and red at the memory of that afternoon on the Holkers' lawn, "I don't like to see those women's eyes fixed upon my cheek when there's anything going on I don't want them to know. A man's transparent like gla.s.s before them. They see into his very soul. They look right through him."

"If the lady who founded the family habits was a fortune-teller,"

the manager interposed, with a scientific air, "that's not so remarkable; for fortune-tellers must always be quick-witted people, keen to perceive the changes of countenance in the dupes who employ them, and prompt at humouring all the fads and fancies of their customers, mustn't they?"

"Quite so," the Colonel echoed. "You've hit it on the nail. And this particular lady--Esmeralda they call her, so that Elma, which is short for Esmeralda, understand, has come to be the regular Christian name among all her women descendants--this particular lady belonged to what you might call a caste or priestly family, as it were, of hereditary fortune-tellers, every one of whose ancestors had been specially selected for generations for the work, till a kind of transmissible mesmeric habit got developed among them. And they do say," the Colonel went on, lowering his voice a little more to a confidential whisper, "that all the girls descended from Madame Esmeralda--Lady Ewes of Charlwood, as she was in England--retain to this day another still odder and uncannier mark of their peculiar origin; but, of course, it's a story that would be hard to substantiate, though I've heard it discussed more than once among the friends of the family."

"Dear me! What's that?" the manager asked, in a tone of marked curiosity.

"Why, they do say," the Colonel went on, now fairly launched upon a piece of after-dinner gossip, "that the eastern snake-dance of Madame Esmeralda's people is hereditary even still among the women of the family, and that, sooner or later, it breaks out unexpectedly in every one of them. When the fit comes on, they shut themselves up in their own rooms, I've been told, and twirl round and round for hours like dancing dervishes, with anything they can get in their hands to represent a serpent, till they fall exhausted with the hysterical effort. Even if a woman of Esmeralda's blood escapes it at all other times, it's sure to break out when she first sees a real live snake, or falls in love for the first time. Then the dormant instincts of the race come over her with a rush, at the very dawn of womanhood, all quickened and aroused, as it were, in the general awakening."

"That's very curious!" the manager said, leaning back in his chair in turn, and twirling his thumbs, "very curious indeed; and yet, in its way, very probable, very probable. For habits like those must set themselves deep in the very core of the system, don't you think, Colonel? If this woman, now, was descended from a whole line of ancestresses, who had all been trained for their work into a sort of ecstatic fervour, the ecstasy and all that went with it must have got so deeply ingrained--"

"I beg your pardon," the Colonel interrupted, consulting his watch and seizing his hat hastily--for as a Kelmscott, he refused point-blank to be lectured--"I've an appointment at my club at half-past three, and I must not wait any longer. Well, you'll get these young men's address for me, then, at the very earliest possible opportunity?"

The manager pocketed the snub, and bowed his farewell. "Oh, certainly," he answered, trying to look as pleased and gracious as his features would permit. "Our confidential clerk will hunt them up immediately. We're delighted to be of use to you. Good morning.