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Neither at Plymouth nor anywhere else along the skirts of Dartmoor could he learn that anything more had been seen or heard of the man who called himself "Mr. McGregor." And yet Guy felt sure Nevitt wouldn't go far from Mambury, as things stood just then; for as soon as he missed the pocket-book containing the three thousand pounds, he would surely take some steps to recover it.
But the eminent Q.C., better versed in the wiles of time and place than Guy Waring in his innocence, had not come obtrusively to Mambury village or asked point-blank at the Talbot Arms by his own right name for the man he was in search of. Such simplicity of procedure would never even have occurred to that practised hand at the Old Bailey. Mr.
"It is rumoured that a further inducement to the crime may perhaps be sought in the fact that the deceased gentleman had a large sum of money in his possession in Bank of England notes at the time of his death. These notes he carried in a pocket-book about his person, where they were seen by the landlord of the Talbot Arms at Mambury, the night before the supposed murder.
The clerk gazed at him carelessly; that big and burly man with the great awkward hands raised no picture in his brain of the supposed murderer of McGregor in the wood at Mambury as that murderer had been described to him by the police that morning, from a verbal portrait after the landlord of the Talbot Arms.
He seemed to the observant eye merely interested and curious, as the landlord finished his sentence carelessly "Person who did it's supposed to be a young man who was at Mambury this week, of the name of Waring." Gilbert Gildersleeve's heart gave another bound, still more violent than before. But again he repressed with difficulty all external symptoms of his profound agitation.
Sir Gilbert faltered: Elma Clifford's eyes were upon him still, compelling him. "Because," he said at last, with a still more evident and physical effort, pumping the words out slowly, "I am here to administer justice, and justice I will administer.... This man is innocent. It was I myself who killed Montague Nevitt that day at Mambury."
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.
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?
None of them had the faintest doubt in his own mind each swore that the prisoner before the magistrates was the self-same person who went over to Mambury on that fatal day, and who followed Montague Nevitt down the path by the river. As Cyril listened, one terrible fact dawned clearer and clearer upon his brain.
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.
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