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Shippen had been out for a little exercise, and withal had some curiosity to see the mad carnival that had broken out in the staid city. "Ah, it is Madam Wetherill's little girl!" looking sharply at Nevitt. "I thought I had seen the child somewhere," said the young man who had caused the accident. "Can we not take her home at once?" "I am her brother," was Nevitt's stiff reply.
"All square," the second clerk said, in a half-whispered aside. "It's him right enough." And the cashier proceeded to count out the notes with oft-wetted fingers. Guy took them up mechanically, like a drunken man, counted them over one by one in a strange, dazed way; and staggered out at last to the cab to Nevitt. Nevitt leaned forward and took the bundle from his hands.
It was a crushing blow. He had need of steadying. Some men would have flown in such a plight to brandy. Montague Nevitt flew, instead, to the consolations of music. For some minutes, indeed, he paced his room up and down in solemn silence. Then his eye fell by accident on the violin case in the corner. Ah, that would do!
Nevitt stared hard at the painter's eyes, which tried, without success, to look unconscious. "A romance!" he said, slowly, scanning his man with deep interest. "A romance, I can see. Young, rich, and beautiful. My dear Cyril, I only wish I'd had half your luck. What a splendid chance, and what a magnificent introduction! Beauty in distress! A lady in trouble!
Montague Nevitt, besides being a man of business and a man of taste, was also in due season a man of feeling. A heart beat beneath that white rosebud in his left top button-hole. All his thoughts were not thoughts of greed and of gain. He was bound to Tilgate to-day, and to see a lady. It isn't so easy in England to see a lady alone. But fortune favours the brave. Luck always attended Mr.
Somewhere down Cyril's way, too; he's painting near Chetwood; wonder whether he could possibly, by any chance, have been in it?" He drew the paper carelessly from his pocket as he spoke, and handed it with a graceful air of inborn courtesy to his younger companion. Everything that Montague Nevitt did, indeed, was naturally graceful and courteous.
Only one man on board was aware of his guilt, Guy believed, and that one man he shunned accordingly as far as was possible within the narrow limits of the saloon and the quarter-deck. Granville Kelmscott, of course, took a very different view of Guy Waring's position. He had read in the paper he bought at Plymouth that Guy was the murderer of Montague Nevitt.
And on this particular evening, as Nevitt stood swaying himself to and fro upon the hearth-rug before the empty grate, with his eyes half closed, drawing low, weird music with his enchanted bow from those submissive strings, Guy leaned back on the sofa and listened, entranced, with a hopeless feeling of utter inability ever to approach the wizard-like and supreme execution of that masterly hand and those superhuman fingers.
"And then I did a grievous wrong," the judge continued once more, his voice now very thick and growing rapidly thicker. "I did a grievous wrong, for which here to-day, before all this court, I humbly ask Guy Waring's pardon. I had killed Montague Nevitt, unintentionally, unwittingly, accidentally almost, in a moment of anger, never knowing I was killing him.
"Foxy ferreting," Montague Nevitt repeated, drawing back as if stung, and profoundly astonished. "Why, what do you mean by that, Mr. Gildersleeve? I don't understand you." The home-thrust was too true after the great cross-examiner's well-known bullying manner not to pierce him to the quick. "Who dares to say I go anywhere ferreting?"
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