CHAPTER XXII.
CROSS PURPOSES.
At the Gildersleeves', too, the house that day was alive with
excitement.
Gwendoline had thrown herself into a fever of alarm as soon as she
had posted her letter to Granville Kelmscott. She went up to her
own room, flung herself wildly on the hed, and sobbed herself into
a half-hysterical, half-delirious state, long before dinner-time.
She hardly knew herself at first how really ill she was. Her hands
were hot and her forehead burning. But she disregarded such mere
physical and medical details as those, by the side of a heart too
full for utterance. She thought only of Granville, and of that
horrid man who had threatened with such evident spite and rancour
to ruin him.
She lay there some hours alone, in a high fever, before her mother
came up to her room to fetch her. Mrs. Gildersleeve was a subdued
and soft-voiced woman, utterly crushed, so people said, by the
stronger individuality of that blustering, domineering, headstrong
man, her husband. And to say the truth, the eminent Q.C. had taken
all the will out of her in twenty-three years of obedient slavery.
She was pretty still, to be sure, in a certain faded, jaded,
unassuming way; but her patient face wore a constant expression
of suppressed terror, as if she expected every moment to be the
victim of some terrible and unexplained exposure. And that feature
at least in her idiosyncrasy could hardly be put down to Gilbert
Gildersleeve's account; for hectoring and strong-minded as the
successful Q.C. was known to be, nobody could for a moment accuse
him in any definite way of deliberate unkindness to his wife or
daughter. On the contrary, he was tender and indulgent to them to
the last degree, as he understood those virtues. It was only by
constant assertion of his own individuality, and constant repression
or disregard of theirs, that he had broken his wife's spirit and
was breaking his daughter's. He treated them as considerately as
one treats a pet dog, doing everything for them that care and money
could effect, except to admit for a moment their claim to independent
opinions and actions of their own, or to allow the possibility
of their thinking and feeling on any subject on earth one nail's
breadth otherwise than as he himself did.
At sight of Gwendoline, Mrs. Gildersleeve came over to the bed with
a scared and startled air, felt her daughter's face tenderly with
her hands for a moment, and then cried in alarm, "Why, Gwennie,
what's this? Your cheeks are burning! Who on earth has been here?
Has that horrid man come down again from London to worry you?"
Gwendoline looked up and tried to prevaricate. But conscience was
too strong for her; the truth would out for all that. "Yes, mother,"
she cried, after a pause, "and he said, oh, he said--I could never
tell you what dreadful things he said. But he's so wicked, so cruel!
You never knew such a man! He thinks I want to marry Granville
Kelmscott, and so he told me--" She broke off, of a sudden, unable
to proceed, and buried her face in her hands, sobbing long and
bitterly.
"Well, what did he tell you, dear?" Mrs. Gildersleeve asked, with
that frightened air, as of a startled wild thing, growing deeper
than ever upon her countenance as she uttered the question.
"He told me--oh, he told me--I can't tell you what he told me; but
he threatened to ruin us--he threatened it so dreadfully. It was
a hateful threat. He seemed to have found out something that he
knew would be our ruin. He frightened me to death. I never heard
any one say such things as he did."
Mrs. Gildersleeve drew back in profound agitation. "Found out
something that would be our ruin!" she cried, with white face all
aghast. "Oh, Gwennie, what do you mean? Didn't he tell you what
it was? Didn't he try to explain to you? He's a wicked, wicked man
--so cruel, so unscrupulous! He gets one's secrets into his hands,
by underhand means, and then uses them to make one do whatever he
chooses. I see how it is. He wants to force us into letting him
marry you--into making you marry him! Oh, Gwennie, this is hard.
Didn't he tell you at all what it was he knew? Didn't he give you
a hint what sort of secret he was driving at?"
Gwendoline looked up once more, and murmured low through her sobs,
"No, he didn't say what it was. He's too cunning for that. But I
think--I think it was something about Granville. Mother, I never
told you, but you know I love him! I think it was something about
HIM, though I can't quite make sure. Some secret about somebody not
being properly married, or something of that sort. I didn't quite
understand. You see, he was so discreetly vague and reticent."
Mrs. Gildersleeve drew back her face all aghast with horror. "Some
secret--about somebody--not being properly married!" she repeated
slowly, with wild terror in her eyes.
"Yes, mother," Gwendoline gasped out, with an effort once more.
"It was about somebody not being really the proper heir; he made
me promise I wouldn't tell; but I don't know how to keep it. He
was immensely full of it; it was an awful secret; and he said he
would ruin us--ruin us ruthlessly. He said we were in his power,
and he'd crush us under his heel. And, oh, when he said it, you
should have seen his face. It was horrible, horrible. I've seen
nothing else since. It dogs me--it haunts me."
Mrs. Gildersleeve sat down by the bedside wringing her hands in
silence. "It's too late to-night," she said at last, after a long
deep pause, and in a voice like a woman condemned to death, "too
late to do anything; but to-morrow your father must go up to town
and try to see him. At all costs we must buy him off. He knows
everything--that's clear. He'll ruin us. He'll ruin us!"
"It's no use papa going up to town, though," Gwendoline answered
half dreamily. "That dreadful man said he was going away for his
holiday to the country at once. He'll be gone to-morrow."
"Gone? Gone where?" Mrs. Gildersleeve cried, in the same awestruck
voice.
"To Devonshire," Gwendoline replied, shutting her eyes hard and
still seeing him.
Mrs. Gildersleeve echoed the phrase in a startled cry. "To
Devonshire, Gwendoline! To Devonshire! Did he say to Devonshire?"
"Yes," Gwendoline went on slowly, trying to recall his very words.
"To the skirts of Dartmoor, I think he said; to a place in the
wilds by the name of Mambury."
"Mambury!"
The terror and horror that frail and faded woman threw into the one
word fairly startled Gwendoline. She opened her eyes and stared
aghast at her mother. And well she might, for the effect was
electrical. Mrs. Gildersleeve was sitting there, transfixed with
awe and some unspeakable alarm; her figure was rigid; her face was
dead white; her mouth was drawn down with a convulsive twitch; she
clasped her bloodless hands on her knees in mute agony. For a moment
she sat there like a statue of flesh. Then, as sense and feeling
came back to her by slow degrees, she could but rock her body up
and down in her chair with a short swaying motion, and mutter over
and over again to herself in that same appalled and terrified voice,
"Mambury--Mambury--Mambury--Mambury."
"That was the name, I'm sure," Gwendoline went on, almost equally
alarmed. "On a hunt after records, he said; on a hunt after records.
Whatever it was he wanted to prove, I suppose he knew that was the
place to prove it."
Mrs. Gildersleeve rose, or to speak with more truth, staggered
slowly to her feet, and, steadying herself with an effort, made
blindly for the door, groping her way as she went, like some faint
and wounded creature. She said not a word to Gwendoline. She had
no tongue left for speech or comment. She merely stepped on, pale
and white, pale and white, like one who walks in her sleep, and
clutched the door-handle hard to keep her from falling. Gwendoline,
now thoroughly alarmed, followed her close on her way to the top
of the stairs. There Mrs. Gildersleeve paused, turned round to her
daughter with a mute look of anguish and held up one hand, palm
outward, appealingly, as if on purpose to forbid her from following
farther. At the gesture, Gwendoline fell back, and looked after her
mother with straining eyes. Mrs. Gildersleeve staggered on, erect,
yet to all appearance almost incapable of motion, and stumbled
down the stairs, and across the hall, and into the drawing-room
opposite. The rest Gwendoline neither saw, nor heard, nor guessed
at. She crept back into her own room, and, flinging herself on her
bed alone as she stood, cried still more piteously and miserably
than ever.
Down in the drawing-room, however, Mrs. Gildersleeve found the
famous Q.C. absorbed in the perusal of that day's paper. She came
across towards him, pale as a ghost, and with ashen lips. "Gilbert,"
she said slowly, blurting it all out in her horror, without one
word of warning, "that dreadful man Nevitt has seen Gwennie again,
and he's told her he knows all, and he means to ruin us, and he's
heard of the marriage, and he's gone down to Mambury to hunt up
the records!"
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!
"There's only one thing possible for it, Minnie," he said at last,
drawing a long deep breath. "I must go down to Mambury to-morrow
to be beforehand with him. And I must either buy him off; or else,
if that won't do--"
"Or else what, Gilbert?"
She trembled like an aspen leaf.
"Or else get at the books in the vestry myself," the Q.C. muttered
low between his clenched teeth, "before the fellow has time to see
them and prove it."
