The World's Great Snare Read online

  He ceased, and Lady Helen too was silent. It was all utterly different to what she had expected. All traces of that former boorishness had fallen away from him. He had spoken, indeed, with a quiet eloquence which had found its way to her heart. She was shaken and agitated as she had never been before in her life, and had never dreamed of being. Least of all had she supposed that in this man’s presence her heart would beat, and her power of speech falter. She had imagined herself calm and collected, and him nervously incoherent, perhaps violent. And there he stood before her, silent and manly, and she—was neither calm nor collected. It was true that there was a passion in his bright eyes and glowing face, a passion which had rung, too, in his voice. But it was the passion which dignifies.

  “I am sorry,” she said at last, raising her gray eyes slowly to his. “I do not care for you—in that way. I do not think that I ever should. I do not think it would be right of me to give you any word of hope.”

  He made no gesture, nor did he wince. Her face had softened to him as it had never done before, and he was fully conscious of it. He remained silent, and waited. And as he stood there, a long shaft of yellow light from westward smote the tops of the trees above them, and fell across the dry, brown undergrowth at their feet. They both glanced up at the rift in the sky, and their eyes met again.

  “You have been very frank with me,” she said; “I will try to be the same with you. You must not mind if it hurts! Nothing can be so good as the truth. You must please remember that I am not a woman of impulse, or,” she continued hesitatingly, “of over-much imagination. I really don’t think that I have very much heart. On the other hand, I know that I am what people call proud. I have not thought much about marriage; but if I do marry, the man must be at least of equal position to my own. I should want to take the lead in society rather than follow, and I should require my husband to have a career. As to marrying a man without a name, I do not think that I could do it. It is possible, as you say, that if I were to love any one very much, I might alter. But I do not love any one and I cannot imagine myself loving any one sufficiently to make such a sacrifice. Do you know,” she added, looking up at him frankly, “I think you have imagined me to be a very different person from what I really am. You have thought about me a good deal, and you have built up a Lady Helen in your thoughts not at all like me. You are rather a dreamer. I am very matter-of-fact. Even if I felt differently about it, it would still be impossible, for I could not marry without Lord Wessemer’s consent, and he would never give it in your case. Let us consider all this as over, and be friends.”

  Curiously enough, he was not disappointed. She had listened to him with patience; she had spoken kindly. It was the first step, he told himself. Besides, he had seen a new look in her face, a more womanly one than it had ever worn before, and he was far from despair.

  “You do not love me, but you do not love any one else!” he said, with a curious little tremor in his tone, almost of exultation. “I am content to wait. It will come. I do not believe that you are heartless! Helen, my love, my dear love, it will come! I can wait! No, you need not shrink back. I shall not touch you till you give yourself to me of your own free will. Some day you will forget that I am nameless, for you will love me. Farewell!”

  A sudden warmth had stolen to her heart. More than one man had asked her to marry him, but none had ever spoken to her like this. The man’s very daring seemed to fascinate her. She could not escape from his eyes, and she felt herself curiously, yet in a manner pleasantly, moved.

  “You must not call me such names!” she said, with an effort at iciness. “You must not speak to me like that!”

  He bowed before her. A wonderful tact seemed to be prompting him exactly how far he might go.

  “You need not fear,” he said softly. “This moment I claim for my own; but the future shall be yours. You shall be Lady Helen to me then. But now I am your lover, and you are Helen, my dearest Helen!”

  His fingers closed like a vise upon her hand, and before she could prevent it he had raised it to his lips. She could feel his burning kiss through her thick glove; but strangely enough she was not angry. He was master of the situation, and she seemed content that he should be so. It was all very strange. He stooped, and picked up Tony, and held the gate open for her. She passed through without a word. She did not look at him again, or speak. And Bryan strode back across the moor, and wondered whether the first part of his walk had been a dream, until his eyes fell upon the distant outline of the little old-fashioned Vicarage. Then his heart sank again.

  XIII. THE BITTER WATERS MADE SWEET

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  “At last they have let me in! Why—”

  Bryan stopped short in the middle of the low drawing-room. His sentence terminated with that little shocked exclamation. He felt that it might not be wise to be too much affected by the change he saw in her face. But she concluded it for him.

  “You think—that I have altered! It is true! I have grown older—years older since last week! You see! Even my hands are thinner!”

  He drew up a footstool close to her side, and smoothed the delicate white fingers in his. All his vague resentment at her seclusion was gone. In a dim sort of way he understood something of what she must have gone through. Her hair was white, and her cheeks hollower and more blanched. The lustre had gone from her eyes. All that dainty sprightliness which had seemed to keep her young and gay in spite of her fragile health and years, had died away. He was shocked at the change in her.

  “I am glad you came!” she said. “I am alone. Raymond has gone out.”

  “I have been every day,” he answered. “I was afraid that you did not want me any more.”

  Her eyes filled with tears. She laid her hand gently upon his.

  “It was not that, Bryan,” she said softly. “It was not that, indeed!”

  He drew a deep sigh of relief.

  “I made sure of seeing you yesterday,” he said. “You had another visitor.”

  She looked at him with an anxious face, and sighed. “Yes, Lord Wessemer was here. I sent for him. I—I had business. Let me give you some tea.”

  She bent over the tray, but her fingers were trembling so that she nearly dropped the sugar tongs. He stretched out his hand and imprisoned hers.

  “Let me make the tea,” he said. “I can do it. See!”

  She leaned back with a faint smile, and he filled her cup and put it down beside her. Then he helped himself and sat at her feet, looking thoughtfully out across the little strip of lawn and the yew hedge to where the twilight was settling down upon the moor.

  “Bryan!” she said softly. “Something has happened to you. There is a new look upon your face. What is it?”

  He did not dream of evading her question. He answered her simply and at once.

  “I saw Lady Helen—yesterday afternoon.”

  “And—and you told her!”

  “Yes. I told her.”

  “Look at me, Bryan.”

  He turned his face away from the window and obeyed her. She bent forward, that she might see him more clearly in the gathering gloom.

  “I do not understand!” she said wearily. “You look almost as though some good thing had happened to you. She did not—”

  Bryan shook his head.

  “No. It is just a little hope. That is all! Perhaps I have no right to it. But she talked to me for the first time as though I were of the same flesh and blood as herself. She knows that I am not giving her up. She faltered when she spoke to me. She forgot to be a statue; she looked and spoke like a woman. I had never seen her like it before!”

  “She will never marry you!” Miss Bettesford said sadly. “You do not know these Wessemers, Bryan. I do. They are proud, and cold, and selfish. She would be the last woman in the world to marry a man who was not of her own rank, and you—my poor boy—you—”

  He held up his hand, looking at her in surprise. Her hands were trembling, and her voice was feverish with excitement.
/>   “Ay, I know!” he said doggedly. “But I may not be always nameless! And if I am—so much the greater will be my triumph when I make her love me. But you are talking too much. I was forgetting.”

  Her thin, trembling hands were upon his shoulders, and she was leaning over towards him. A brilliant spot of scarlet was burning on her thin cheeks, and her eyes were strangely bright.

  “Bryan,” she cried, “give her up! Give her up! Bryan, you are only sowing for yourself the seeds of a greater sorrow! There are women in the world more worthy of you who will be kinder than she!”

  He shook his head.

  “There are no other women in the world for me,” he muttered. “Besides, you do not know! The name I have taken was really my father’s name. I am having a search made. Every day I am expecting news. It may be—”

  He stopped short. She had suddenly thrown aside the rugs, and had risen to her feet. She was standing a little way away from him on the hearthrug, with her hands pressed to her head, and a strange look in her face. When she spoke her voice reached him in a forced, half-stifled whisper.

  “Bryan—you are killing me!” she cried. “God help you! God help us both! You have no name! You never will have! And it is my fault!”

  He rose slowly up and stood facing her. His eyes were distended and his lips were trembling. He did not recognize his own voice. It was like a far-off echo sounding dully in his ears. And through the twilight her eyes seemed to be burning in her gaunt, white face as she watched him.

  “Your fault! Your—your fault!”

  “Yes, Bryan. I—I am your mother!”

  She made a sudden movement towards him, and held wide her arms. A wild imploring tenderness flashed into her face, showed itself even in the gestures of her mute dramatic appeal. After all, he was her son, her flesh and her blood. How could he curse her!

  “Bryan! Bryan!”

  Her voice touched an exquisite note of appeal, and faltered. He did not move. He was standing like a great statue of stone. She watched the lines of his face in agony. Was this to be her death, the crowning of her life of sorrow? For close on thirty years the shadow of her sin had stalked by her side, had dwelt with her through the long nights and the dreary days. Was this its incarnation come to torture her, to deal the final and the cruellest stripe of all? The very glow of life which warmed his veins was hers. He was her creature—her son, flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone. Once more she found courage, and she called out to him:

  “Bryan, forgive me! Speak to me, or I shall die!”

  He opened his great arms, and with a little cry, she fell into them.

  “Forgive! I have nothing to forgive you!” he said hoarsely. “You are my mother!”

  Then the low ceiling seemed to her to vanish into air, and a light came down from heaven. For nine-and-twenty years she had been a lone and suffering woman, and now—she had found a son!

  * * * * *

  Yet when it was all over, when the passionate kisses with which she had covered his face were burning no longer, and many things had passed between them which have no place in this or any story, he felt a sudden chill at his heart. The joy of this thing had been instant and deep, but there was an after-taste of bitterness. They were still alone, and, holding her hands, and looking down upon the floor, he asked her that question.

  “Mother—tell me! I want to know about him.”

  She tightened her clasp upon his hands.

  “Have you not guessed?” she murmured.

  Their eyes met. He knew! He opened his lips to speak, but the sound was drowned by the furious galloping of horses in the lane. They both turned towards the window. A brougham covered with mud, and with steaming horses, had drawn up at the gate, and a tall, slim figure was walking up the garden path. Mother and son looked at one another.

  “There is no time for me to go away,” he said hoarsely.

  “You need not,” she answered. “Stay!”

  He held her hands, and thus they stood for a moment. Then the door was opened, and the little maidservant announced the Earl of Wessemer.

  He came towards them out of the shadows, holding his hat in his hand; but in the centre of the room he paused. A leaping tongue of firelight had shown him her face and his. He realized at once that the secret of a lifetime had gone for ever.

  He set his hat down, and came forward more slowly. That studiously-acquired philosophy by which he had aimed at the extinction of all emotion stood him in good stead. He did not lose one iota of his self-control. Whilst they faced him, ill at ease and constrained, he was at once urbane and collected. The dramatic pathos of the situation was altogether lost upon him.

  “So, Bryan, you have found your mother!” he said quietly. “Perhaps it is better!”

  Bryan did not answer. He had no words at his command. He stood dumb.

  “It is possible that you may feel very bitterly towards me,” Lord Wessemer continued calmly, standing a little way from the two, with his hands behind his back. “If it be so, I do not blame you. I was the sinner, and you have to bear the burden of my fault. It must seem heinously unfair to you. It is heinously unfair. But the thing has happened before, and it will happen again. I am more sorry than I ever imagined I should be. I would give even the remaining years of my life to set you right with the world! But I cannot do it! Nobody can do it! If you reflect calmly upon the subject, you will remember that all feeling bestowed upon it is wasted. It cannot be altered. Say what you have to say to me, Bryan!”

  He drew himself a little away from his mother, and stood apart. For several moments a deep silence reigned in the room. They both waited for his sentence. A log of wood fell from the fire, and a flame leaped up. In the red light they both caught a glimpse of his face. His brows were closely drawn, but its expression was quite inscrutable. She shivered as she looked at it, and nervously clasped her hands. There was something there akin to his father.

  “Not here,” he answered at last. “I will talk to you when we are alone.”

  “Come back with me now,” Lord Wessemer said, taking up his hat. “It will be better to have it over.”

  Bryan turned, and, stooping down, kissed his mother tenderly. She drew his face down to hers.

  “You will not be too harsh?” she pleaded.

  “I will not.”

  “You will remember—”

  “I am not any one’s judge,” he answered quietly. “You need have no fear.”

  “And you will come back?”

  “If not to-night, to-morrow,” he promised. So she was content, and she let him go.

  XIV. BRYAN THE PHILOSOPHER

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  In less than half an hour the two men were sitting facing one another in the great library at Wessemer Court. Bryan was perfectly calm and composed. The dramatic strangeness of this new light thrown upon his life had passed away altogether, so far as his connection with Lord Wessemer was concerned. He found himself even looking around him, and wondering how he might have felt if this place had belonged to him, and he had been this man’s lawful son. But when a servant brought in tea and liqueurs, and placed the tray between them, and Lord Wessemer pushed over a box of cigarettes towards him, the bathos of the whole situation dawned upon him with an irresistible grotesqueness. He leaned back in his chair and laughed long and silently. Lord Wessemer, who was lighting a cigarette, looked up at him curiously, forgetting to throw the match away until it almost burned his fingers. Then he sat down, and Bryan helped himself mechanically to a glass of curagoa.

  “There are one or two facts, Bryan, which it is your right to know, and my duty to tell you,” Lord Wessemer began. “Shall I do so now?”

  Bryan nodded.

  “You have learned to-day who your parents are. You have learned also that they, or rather one of them—myself—have done you an injury for which nothing can ever atone. Remember, Bryan, that I am the only one on whom a shadow of blame can fall—and I am very sorry.”

  It was the first note of rea
l feeling which had found its way into Lord Wessemer’s tone. Bryan detected it at once, but he took no notice.

  “Twenty-eight years ago I was Guy Bryan Nugent, with three persons between myself and the Wessemer title, very poor and very discontented. At that time your mother was the daughter of the Vicar of Wessemer, old Mr. Charles Bettesford, and we fell in love. I had not a penny—neither had she. Marriage seemed utterly impossible, and even I, steeped to the lips in all the dissipations and wild notions of Paris and Vienna (I was in the Embassy there), dared not suggest any alternative to her who was one of the sweetest, and purest, and most beautiful of women. But in the end I did worse—much worse! I pressed her to consent to a secret marriage. By what arts I succeeded, it does not matter now. I did succeed; only what I styled a secret marriage was a sham. It is true that we were married in a church, down in a small Devonshire village, but the man who married us was a confidant of my own, a worthless fellow, and a thorough scamp. His father was the clergyman of the parish, but he was an invalid, and lived abroad, leaving a curate in charge to look after his work. There were two churches, eight miles apart, and one of them was almost always closed, being in a desolate, unpeopled region. The son of the clergyman was my confederate. Your mother knew that he had been my college friend, and readily believed that he was in orders. As a matter of fact, he was not. It was a carefully thought out plan, and it succeeded.