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Worn and weary with the fever, Granville was wholly unfit for any kind of travelling. Nothing but the iron constitution of the Kelmscotts could ever have stood so severe an ordeal.
That was a depth to which the Kelmscott idiosyncrasy could never descend. The Colonel in his horror refused to believe it. He put his hands up feebly to his throbbing brow. This was a ghastly idea a ghastly accusation. The man called Waring had dragged the honour of the Kelmscotts through the mud of the street. There was but one comfort left. He never bore that unsullied name.
These men were gentlemen, the eldest sons of a Kelmscott of Tilgate true Kelmscotts to the core handsome, courtly, erect of bearing.
And perhaps if he'd treated these lads as he ought, and brought them up to their own, and made them Kelmscotts indeed, instead of nameless adventurers, they might never have fallen into such abysses of turpitude.
He shrank from it like poison. That a son of his own, unacknowledged or not, should be a criminal a murderer was terrible enough; but that he should even be suspected of having committed murder for such base and vulgar motives as mere thirst of gain was more than the blood of the Kelmscotts could put up with.
The secret Gilbert Gildersleeve thought he had come down to Mambury to discover was not the secret he had actually found out in the register that morning. It was nothing about the Kelmscotts or Guy and Cyril Waring; it was something about the great Q..C. and his wife themselves presumably some unknown and disgraceful fact in Mrs. Gilbert Gildersleeve's early history.
For the Kelmscotts, of Tilgate Park, were the oldest county family in all that part of Surrey; and Colonel Kelmscott himself passed as the proudest man of that haughtiest house in Southern England. What, therefore, could have made him give so curious and almost imperceptible a start the moment Guy Waring's name was mentioned in conversation?
"My son, my son," he cried, in his despair, "you have said it yourself. Your own mouth has suggested it. What use my trying to keep it from you any longer? These lads are Kelmscotts." "And my mother?" Granville Kelmscott burst out, in a very tremulous voice. The question was almost more than a man dare ask. But he asked it in the first bitterness of a terrible awakening.
I don't know whom you bribe, and I have nothing to say to it. I never dragged the honour of the Kelmscotts in the dust. I won't drag it now. I wash my hands clean from it. I ask no questions. I demand no explanations. I only say this. Until I know what you mean know whether I'm lawful heir to Tilgate Park or not, I won't marry the girl I meant to marry.
Cyril Waring read it out with a little thrill of triumph. To be sure, it was by no means certain that Elma would be there; but still, Chetwood Court was well within range of Tilgate town, and Montague Nevitt felt convinced, he said, the Holkers were friends of the Cliffords and the Kelmscotts.
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