The World's Great Snare Read online

  “And a breakfast-cup,” Raymond put in. “I know a starving man when I see one. Give him something to start with, Auntie.”

  Bryan laughed as he took his tea and doubled up his bread-and-butter.

  “We’ve had a glorious day,” he said; “but hounds took us right into the forest country, and I never got my second horse at all. Just picked him up on the way home, not a mile from here. I made sure of being at Longton Spinnies, and John had my sandwich-case. Hence this voracity.”

  “Did you kill?” she asked.

  “Yes, twenty miles from home, and the Lord only knows where!” Bryan answered. “It was a strange country to every one of us. I’ve nearly killed my horse, I’m afraid. Was ever anything in the world so good as this tea, I wonder?”

  They talked about the run and the people who were there for a few minutes, and then Raymond got up.

  “I must go and see old Mrs. Elwick,” he said. “Coming down to-morrow morning, Bryan?”

  “Would you mind coming up to me?” Bryan asked, holding out his empty cup. “Delagood and Captain Hawkesworth are coming over to lunch, and there are one or two more men likely to drop in. I thought if you could get up at about eleven, we could have an hour to ourselves.”

  “All right,” Raymond answered. “I like your luncheon parties. No ladies coming, are there?”

  “No, I don’t entertain ladies,” Bryan answered drily.

  Raymond went out, and Bryan and Miss Bettesford were left alone. He finished his tea, and lit a cigarette. It was understood that this was always to be done.

  Bryan had been looking thoughtfully in the fire, and the silence between them had lasted for some time. Suddenly he looked up, and found her eyes fixed steadily upon him.

  “Bryan,” she said softly, “I was wondering a little at the tone of your last speech. Are you a woman-hater?”

  He took her thin white hand into his, and stroked it tenderly.

  “Are not you a woman?” he said.

  She laughed quietly, and looked at him with soft, dim eyes.

  “I am an old woman, Bryan; and it is not of old women that I was thinking.”

  “Old!” he repeated, with gentle scorn.

  “Old enough to be your mother, Bryan! I am thankful for it. I would not be a year younger, a year further away from the end. But never mind that. Tell me. They say that you never seem to care about talking to any of the girls round here. Lady Brankhurst got positively indignant about it the other day. She has eight daughters, and she thinks you ought to marry.”

  There was no answer. Bryan had risen to his feet, and was standing upon the hearthrug. Miss Bettesford abandoned her half-playful tone, and laid her hand upon his arm.

  “Bryan,” she said earnestly, “I have sometimes wondered—is your heart quite so hard as people think? Is there not some one—whom you think of a good deal; some one—”

  He looked down at her. The lines in his face had suddenly relaxed. Then, with a quick impulse, he dropped down on one knee and took both her hands in his.

  “May I tell you?” he said, his deep voice a little unsteady. “I should like to; I think it would do me good.”

  She laid her hand caressingly on his clustering wind-tossed hair, and smoothed it.

  “Yes, tell me,” she whispered. “I should like to hear everything!”

  He drew a deep breath. The strong, deep passion of the man was working itself out between the lines of his story.

  “I was a vagabond when I was a boy,” he said. “I have told you that already. No one could do anything with me. I poached, drank, swore, and did all manner of evil. One day I saved a little girl’s life. She was kind to me. I had never seen anything like her, and I thought she was an angel. When I heard who she was, I cursed. She was a lady, and I—was a vagabond. There was a great gulf between us. That night I got drunk, but on the morrow I lay all day on the hills, looking at the great house where she lived, and I made a resolution. I would turn over a new leaf. I would throw myself headlong into that gulf, and I would come out on the other side.”

  “Poor boy,” she whispered, “poor boy! Was there no one to look after you?”

  “Not a soul! My mother must either have died, or she must have been a very wicked woman.”

  “Don’t, please don’t!”

  Bryan looked down in surprise. She had stopped him with a sharp little cry of pain.

  “I—I don’t like to hear you speak harshly of her,” she said, with a little shudder. “You do not know! She may not have been to blame!”

  Her white, pleading face checked the reply which had risen to his lips. He could not bear to give her pain.

  “That may be so,” he answered. “Anyhow, I was brought up by an old couple who were notoriously not related to me. I had money when I chose to fetch it, but not one friend; no one to encourage me; not a soul to sympathize with me! It was very lonely in those days.”

  “My poor boy!”

  “Well, a drunken man came reeling into my cottage one night, and he let fall some hints which set me all on fire. He told me, in his incoherent way, that he knew who I was; and to know that seemed to me to be the first step towards fortune. In the morning he had stolen away; but I followed him all over the world. I did not succeed altogether, and yet I succeeded in part. But I found gold, and I found an honest partner. You know all that part of the story. But there is a part of my life in California which you do not know, and which, God help me, I must tell you!”

  His face had grown suddenly white and strained. Worse than anything else upon the earth, or under the earth, he dreaded the wildly sweet memory of those days of his bondage.

  “Never mind, Bryan,” she whispered, “I shall not judge you hardly. Good God! I shall not judge you at all!”

  “So long as you do not turn me away, and tell me not to come here any more, I shall feel better for having told you,” he said. “San Francisco is a wild, evil place, and the men there lead wild, evil lives. There was—a girl. She was in trouble, and I helped her. She came to me—if it had not been me it would have been some one else—and—and she lived with me. It was a strange, wonderful time. She was beautiful, and in a way—I think—I am afraid—I must have loved her! She was not wicked. She had been cruelly treated. Her beauty was marvellous. It fascinated me; it seemed to corrupt my very soul! It was what I had sworn should never happen—and it happened! But there came a time when I loathed myself. One night I woke up, I dreamed that she—had seen me! I got up and dressed quietly, and hurried away. I left half my money behind, and I fled. That day I went to the gold-diggings. I thought that I was safe there, but I was not. She loved me, and she followed me. She followed across the burning plains and the wild, bare desert; a week’s journey, and no human soul with her; she who hated the darkness, and was frightened at a shadow. What could I do? God! what could I do? We left the place together, and in the desert she saved my life. She had scarcely fired a pistol in her life, yet she shot the man through the heart who tried to kill me! I had a fever. She nursed me through it. She took me, almost dying, to her rooms at San Francisco, and she sold her jewels and the clothes from her back to buy food and wine for me. And when I cried out to come to England, she sold herself, and it was with her money that I came! Oh, God!”

  He wiped the drops of perspiration from his burning forehead. Death itself would have seemed less bitter than this. “My poor boy!”

  It was all she said, but it soothed him.

  “You do not utterly despise me?” he faltered. “Despise you—no! And she—how good she was to you!”

  “Yes; she was good to me—too good! And I have been a vile brute! Sometimes now—at nights, or when I am riding alone, I fancy I see her in San Francisco, looking across the ocean, looking for me with her dark, sad eyes. Ah!”

  “Poor girl!” she whispered. “What was her name?”

  “Myra!”

  “Poor Myra! My poor boy!”

  There was a long silence. The touch of her fingers upon his hair seemed
to soothe him. Gradually he grew calmer.

  “Tell me—about the English girl. Have you seen her?”

  He drew himself out of her arms, and looked at her steadily.

  “You have not guessed, then?”

  “No!”

  She looked at him with a sudden blanching of her own cheeks. One hand she pressed against her heart. She felt that she was on the verge of a shock.

  “It is Lady Helen!” he said. “Do you think that I am mad?”

  She leaned back in her chair, and a sudden ashen pallor spread itself over her face. He was alarmed, and would have rung or called for help, but her fingers detained him. In a moment she reopened her eyes.

  “Lady Helen!” she repeated. “That is what brought you here to live, then?”

  “Yes! I suppose I am a fool, but I must fulfil my destiny. My folly has made me what I am. I must follow it.”

  The sorrowing light of an ineffable pity shone in her delicate face.

  “Bryan,” she whispered. “Does she know?”

  “Yes,” he answered. “She knows!”

  “She has not encouraged you?”

  “No; the time is not ripe for that, yet.”

  “My poor, poor boy!”

  He leaned forward again.

  “Don’t you think there is any chance for me?” he said hoarsely.

  She shook her head.

  “I think that there is no chance,” she answered. “Lady Helen is, of all the Wessemers I ever knew, the proudest. She will never be able to forget what you were. She will never marry you. She has not soul enough to appreciate what you have done. She is a Wessemer, body, and blood, and soul, and they are a cruel race. My poor boy!”

  He stood Up, and lifted his clenched fists above his head so that they struck the ceiling. A little cry of pain broke from his lips.

  “I must have her!” he said. “My desire for her is the very salt of my life. I will have her! Perhaps,” he added, “perhaps the lawyers who are working for me in London may find out the truth about myself. They may find that there is a name which I have a right to, perhaps a good one. Surely she would forget the past then. You think so, don’t you?”

  He turned towards her eagerly, but she was lying back in her chair with half-closed eyes. She had no answer to give him, save that little moan which stole from between her white lips like the cry of a soul in agony. He leant down and caught her hand. It was cold and lifeless. Her eyes were closed. For a little while he could torture her no more. She had fainted!

  XII. THE SUNLIGHT OF HOPE

  Table of Contents

  For the third time in succession Bryan turned away with darkened face from the Vicarage door, without having seen Miss Bettesford. She was too ill to come down, she had sent word—too ill to see any one. For more than an hour he had watched Lord Wessemer’s carriage waiting in the narrow lane outside the gate; had seen the Earl himself come out, walking with bowed head and unsteady gait, and be driven rapidly away. Yet, when he himself, a few minutes later, walked into the little drawing-room, and sent up a message to her, together with a great bunch of Parma violets which he had ridden twenty miles to fetch, she was too ill to see him. She was not coming down.

  He turned away with a curious pain at his heart, and setting his teeth, strode away towards the open country. It was a gray, windy afternoon, and a salt breeze was blowing in from the sea, filling the air with moisture, and carrying the white spray in little clouds far inland across the rolling moors. He faced the wind and walked against it, finding a certain vague relief in the strong gusts which forced him to put out his strength to subdue them, and in the deep gullies over which he leaped with unseeing recklessness. It was a gray afternoon indeed. Never had he been so near the bitter black waters of despair, never had all that he had gained seemed so little and of so small avail. For the first time he thought of those days in California with a distinct and certain regret. Never had that wild freedom of body and soul seemed so attractive to him. A touch of the old vagabondage stole into his blood. He longed to tear off his well-fitting tweed shooting-suit, and to go in rags, to drink, laugh, shout, sleep in the open air with the moon to watch through the trees at night, and the sun to call him up at dawn. He thought of the Blue River, the morning plunges into the deep cool waters, the great snow-capped mountains set in violet dawn light, of the hard physical toil, and the excitement of gold-finding. Wild visions of Myra, with, her dark glowing beauty and strange, wild grace, flashed across his mind. He cried out her name, and the wind bore it away behind him. At that moment he longed for her, longed for her to twine her arms around his neck, and cover his face with her passionate kisses. He was a fool not to have stayed with her! He was a fool not to have forgotten this fair, proud girl, in whose sight he was but as the ashes and dust beneath her feet. And this other woman had loved him. She had given her life, and more than her life, for his sake. The utter barbarous brutality of his desertion of her came back to him with a rush. He saw the agony in her white face, and the unconscious reproach in her dark, dim eyes. Well he was paying for his folly, for his wickedness. To-day, his present, his whole environment seemed like a dream. He was Bryan Bryan, of Wessemer Old Hall, no longer. It was unreal, thin, intangible! He had made a fool’s blunder. The best thing he could do would be to take the next boat to New York, to seek out Myra and make her happy, and live amongst the men and women who would never ask him who he was and whence he came. He was out of his place here. He had no right ever to have taken the hand of that sweet-faced, gentle woman, whose delicate purity he had outraged by his presence and his confession. He would never see her again. It was not likely that she would care to see him. She knew him now for what he was, and she despised him! Better—

  His heart gave a mighty leap, and for just a moment, trees and sky spun round before his eyes. Of all persons in the world, the one whom he least expected to see was coming up the hillside towards him.

  He folded his arms, and leaned against a rock, waiting for her coming, unconsciously forming a striking picture against the empty background of sky and air. She looked up, and, seeing him ahead, half hesitated. That moment seemed to him as though it would never end; in reality, her hesitation was very brief indeed. She came on towards him, calling to the dogs by which she was surrounded, and then greeting him with a movement of her head more imperious than gracious.

  “Have you seen Gerald?” she called out, pausing a few yards away. “I thought they were shooting over here, but I haven’t heard a gun.”

  He had taken off his cap, and stood with it in his hand. The wild disquiet of a few minutes ago seemed to have passed away like a dream. At no time had he felt more confidence in himself than he felt in the first glow of this sudden reaction from the depths of despair.

  “Gerald had lunch with me,” he answered. “He was going to meet Hamilton and another man—Dixon, I think—at Welby turn, and then they were going to shoot over the Welby turnips, and home across the moor. I should think that they would be here in an hour.”

  She stooped and patted one of the dogs carelessly.

  “No sport for you to-day, Tony,” she said. “Gerald couldn’t find Tony when he started, so I promised that I would bring him if I could. But I can’t wait an hour.”

  She stood still for a moment, looking at the view. Then she called the dogs together.

  “May I walk with you a little way?” he asked.

  She looked at him, and understood. A woman is quick at such things. Despite her self-control, which was immense, and her natural coldness, her heart beat a shade faster. And yet how ridiculous it was! Perhaps it would be best to let him speak, and to give him such an answer as must silence him for ever.

  “If you like,” she answered indifferently. “I thought you were going the other way, and I was going to ask you to take Tony.”

  “I will take him back with pleasure, if you will let rue come a little way with you first,” he said.

  She made no answer, and they walked along the broad, rough pa
th together, and passed through a gate into a small plantation. Half-way through it there was another gate. Bryan laid his hand upon it, and stopped.

  “I have something to say to you, Lady Helen,” he began. “Do you mind waiting here for a minute? I will not keep you very long.”

  She waited with unmoved face and perfectly calm, but after a moment her eyes fell from his. The fire was too bright for her. In a perfectly mechanical fashion she found herself examining the brown shapely hand which still rested upon the gate. So she stood listening whilst he spoke, his deep bass voice trembling a little now and then, but his manner governed by a wonderful self-restraint. There was nothing which suggested how near indeed he was to despair.

  “Lady Helen, I have waited for some time; I can wait no longer! Things have gone awry with me! An hour ago, I had almost made up my mind to go back to my old life!”

  “Back to your old life!” she repeated. “What nonsense!”

  “Ay, it may seem so!” he answered. “You must remember that I dwell alone; I am a lonely man. Except for one thing, I should be happier in a simpler life. When that thing seems very far off I get weary. I have built my life up on that hope. You know what it is! I don’t ask for too much now. I only ask for just a word of hope to carry home with me, and to chase the dark shadows of my solitude away. Just a single word!”

  He paused for a moment, as though to give her the opportunity of speech. But she did not say anything. She had pictured this scene to herself once or twice lately, regarding it always as inevitable. But it was not turning out quite as she had imagined. She preferred to remain silent.

  “I want to tell you everything, just in a few words. I want you to have it all before you,” he continued. “It is true that I was a vagabond when I saw you first; wild, shiftless, and passionate. I had no one to look after me; no one to care whether I lived or died, or what became of me! I saw you, and I worshipped you. You filled my whole heart; you became my life. I left my cottage, and lay by night under the trees that I might hear the wind sigh through their branches and whisper your name, and then I would close my eyes and fancy that I saw you coming through the shadows up the glade, or across the meadows. By night and day I watched your house. At first I was content with your kind words, and—forgive me!—patronizing notice. But as years went on, my heart became the heart of a man, and the boy’s dream grew into a man’s passion. I became ambitious. The gulf between us was broad and deep, but I devoted my whole life, my every energy, to bridging it. I began to make plans, and from the lips of a drunken man I learnt the possibility of gaining for myself a name and position to which I had a right. And so I crossed the ocean to search for it, and, alas, I failed! But I made a fortune which day by day grows larger. Lady Helen, I have begun to fear that nameless I came into the world, and nameless I must go out of it! But I have ambitions. I am rich, and you have seen for yourself that the people here have been content to take me for what I am. I mean to go into Parliament, and I mean to make a name for myself greater by far than the name I have lost! I can never be worthy of you—no one ever could; but at least you shall never be ashamed of your husband, and—I love you! If only I had words to tell you how much, how you have lived in my dreams, how you fill my whole world! There is nothing in the world worth having for me but your love. I meant to have waited longer; but this afternoon, when I saw you, I was heart-sick and weary. I was almost convinced that I am a fool to be here. Everything was darkness and bitterness. Then you came, and I knew that I must speak to you. I don’t ask for too much. I want just one little word of hope!”