The World's Great Snare

by E. Phillips Oppenheim

  Bryan shook his head. “No. I was here on Tuesday. You had gone round to Tattersall’s, I think.”

  Lord Wessemer nodded, and flicked his eyeglass from his eye.

  “You’ve been in to see Lady Helen, they tell me?”

  “Yes! I’ve been with her some time,” Bryan answered. “She was good enough to give me some tea.”

  Lord Wessemer raised his eyebrows.

  “Glad to hear it!” he said shortly. “I was afraid that you might have found Helen—a little awkward. I can’t say that it was a remarkably discreet thing of you to be driving that little girl from the’ Hilarity ‘in the Park this morning. Of course these things are done, I know, and I should be one of the last to moralize, but a liaison of that sort is best not paraded.”

  “There is no liaison of any sort between that young lady and myself,” Bryan answered shortly.

  Lord Wessemer shrugged his shoulders.

  “As to that I am quite indifferent,” he declared. “If you told me that quite seriously I should, I suppose, believe you, but let me assure you of this—not another man or woman who saw you with her in the Park this morning would believe it. I am very sorry that you should have happened to meet Lady Helen. I am bound to say that from her point of view your behaviour was not exactly delicate. I do not know what she may think, but I myself, Bryan, have begun to wonder whether your intentions with regard to her have wavered. I sent for you—to ask you this.”

  “My intentions with regard to Lady Helen are what they have always been,” Bryan answered steadily.

  “I am glad to hear it. At the same time, I must tell you frankly that I consider you have materially damaged your cause to-day. And side by side with that unfortunate incident, I have just received a letter from the Duke of Devonport telling me that, with my permission, he proposes to ask Lady Helen to become his wife.”

  There was a moment’s silence. Bryan did not look at all confounded.

  “His Grace is too late,” he remarked quietly.

  Lord Wessemer dropped his eyeglass again, and looked Bryan in the face. Then he held out his hand.

  “I am delighted,” he said warmly. “When was it?

  “Just now!” Bryan told him. “An hour ago, Lady Helen consented to be my wife.”

  “I am very glad indeed, Bryan. I have hoped for this! It makes me feel lighter-hearted when I think that, notwithstanding the wrong I have done you, you have been able to win one of the proudest women in England to be your wife.”

  Bryan looked into Lord Wessemer’s face steadily for a moment. Then he rose and stood on the hearthrug before him. The afterglow from a stormy sunset had thrown a strange glare of yellow light upon the faces of the two men. It was odd how the resemblance between them, faint enough at most times, became deepened and intensified in the unnatural illumination.

  Then Bryan spoke slowly, and with an impressive distinctness.

  “Lord Wessemer, would it make you any happier to know that, though by intention you wronged me and my mother, in reality you wronged neither of us?”

  There was a dead silence. Lord Wessemer was bewildered.

  “I do not understand you, Bryan!” he exclaimed.

  “Listen, then. I have told you of my adventures in California, and of the papers I obtained of the man Huntly, who called himself Hamilton. I also told you that I did not believe that all the papers had come into my hands. I was right. Yesterday I received another one. It is a document, or rather half a sheet of note-paper, written by Huntly. The truth of it I have already ascertained by a telegram to Oxford.”

  “Tell me what it is!”

  “It is simply this. It was not you who deceived my mother. It was Huntly who deceived you. When he married you he had been a priest nearly a year. That marriage was a perfectly just and legal one.”

  Lord Wessemer sat down suddenly. His face was ghastly pale.

  “I do not understand,” he faltered. “Huntly was a bad lot. He told me that he had been sent down from Magdalen; that he had not even taken priest’s orders.”

  “He lied! He had been a bad lot, it is true, but he had not been sent down, and he had been a priest nine or ten months, when he married you. His real object was not to serve you, but to get you into his power; to hold this secret over you afterwards as a means of extorting money. This he would have done, but, as you know, he was obliged to fly from the country almost immediately afterwards, and for many years he dared not show himself. When at last he did come back, you were abroad—in India, I think. He came to me, dropped some vague hints when he was drunk, and then took alarm and fled. I followed him to California. You know all the rest. It is very simple.”

  “My God!”

  There was a deep silence between the two men. When Lord Wessemer looked up, the expression of his features was strangely altered. The languid cynicism’ of the philosopher was gone. His face was gray and strained. He was suddenly an old man. Yet there was a wonderful eagerness in his tone.

  “Bryan!” he cried. “You have been cruel to keep this from me a moment. Thank God, there is time to do you justice! You must take my name at once, to-day! I will go and see Lord A. You are my son, Bryan! The world shall know it, and shall know how proud I am to own you! This is—”

  “Stop!”

  The words died away on Lord Wessemer’s lips. Something in Bryan’s still, cold face seemed to suddenly chill the glow which had warmed his heart. He was silent.

  “Listen!” Bryan said. “You have always borne the name of a proud man. I am your son, and I, too, am proud. I will never take the name to which I am entitled only by an accident. I shall never take any other name than the one I have at present. I will not be any more your son in the future than I have been in the past. I have sworn it by the memory of one whose life was a sacrifice to your—villainy!”

  Lord Wessemer forgot at that moment all the tenets which had formed the text of his life. He held out his hands to Bryan, and his eyes were blinded with tears.

  “Bryan, have pity on me!” he pleaded. “I have repented, and I am very lonely. I want a son!”

  Bryan took up his hat and moved towards the door. On the threshold he paused and looked back.

  “There were many years when I wanted a father!” he said slowly, “There were many years when my mother wanted a husband! It is you who sowed the seed of our unhappiness; you, too, must bear your share of the harvest!”

  The door opened and closed, and Bryan passed out into the street. Lord Wessemer was alone.

  V. THE PROBLEM OF TWO LIVES

  Table of Contents

  Most men of robust, virile development and healthy turn of mind, have some definite object in life which holds a distinct and prominent place in the shaping of their destinies. And most men, having attained it, find it a very different thing in their grasp to its semblance when it lurked like a vague shadow upon the perspective of their fancy. Bryan had won what years ago had seemed like a wild and impossible dream to him. The woman who had appeared to him as the creature of another world—an altogether superior order of beings—was his. She had promised to marry him. She had even admitted that, in a way, she cared for him, that in his presence she felt for the first time a distinct preference for one of his sex.

  The news was announced with all the iclat which society journals and society gossip could give it, and on all hands Bryan was warmly congratulated. For several days he could not show himself at either of his clubs without being made the martyr of the same little stereotyped speech, to which he had always to reply in the same manner. One of the first to allude to it, although his acquaintance with him was of the slightest, was Sir George Conyers.

  “I suppose Weymouth Street will have to go?” remarked the baronet, with a knowing little laugh, as the two men stood together for a minute or two. “Poor little Myra! You’re a devilish lucky fellow, Bryan!”

  Bryan drew himself up, and looked at his questioner coldly.

  “I am afraid I do not quite understand you,” he said.


  Sir George laughed. It was not a particularly pleasant laugh.

  “Oh, never mind!” he answered. “Perhaps I ought not to have mentioned it. Fact is, I was thinking that if there’s any vacancy in that quarter, I shouldn’t mind being in the running myself. She’s an uncommonly smart little girl.”

  “Are you alluding to Lady Helen Wessemer?” Bryan asked.

  “Lady Helen! Of course not! I mean Myra Mercier, the actress at the Hilarity.’ I happened to be round at the stage-door one night—little girl in the chorus—when you were waiting for her; and you were driving her in the Park the other day, weren’t you?”

  “I was certainly driving Miss Mercier the other day,” Bryan answered. “She is an old acquaintance of mine; and, pardon me, Sir George, but if you have any remarks to make about that young lady to me, or in my hearing, I shall be glad if you will allude to her with more respect.”

  Sir George whistled, and turning on his heel, walked deliberately away. Bryan strode out of the club in a towering rage.

  His brougham was outside, and he drove at once to Wessemer House. Lady Helen was at home, but seemed surprised to see him.

  “How odd of you to come at this time in the morning!” she exclaimed, holding out her hand. “I can only spare you a minute. I am going out shopping. You look worried!”

  “Helen,” he said impulsively, standing over her, “I am weary of the city, and of this wretched social grind which all leads to nothing! I am sick to death of it all! Let us go down into the country—to Wessemer Court. Think how glorious these summer afternoons would be, out on the moors or on the cliffs! This London air stifles me. I am sick of it—sick of the lies, and the false pretences, and the brutal selfishness of it all. Let us go where we can be alone together, and not see anybody else!”

  She raised her eyebrows, and smiled upon him, as she drew on her gloves.

  “My dear Bryan, what has happened to put you out this morning?” she said. “Go down to the country in May! Why, I never heard such an awful suggestion! Whatever should we find to do?”

  He drew a little away from her. There was a curious pain at his heart. He was more disappointed than he cared to own.

  “It must be as you wish, of course,” he answered quietly. “I thought perhaps that you might feel as I do—that a little quiet—I seem to see so little of you just now—might be rather pleasant. Do you care so very much for society then, Helen?

  “I like my place in it,” she answered firmly. “I don’t think that there is any life which interests me so much as London life. I am looking forward to entertaining for your party, you know, Bryan, when you have made a name for yourself in Parliament. I think that my greatest ambition is to have a ‘salon.’”

  “A ‘salon!’” he repeated.

  “Yes, that sort of thing is wretchedly done nowadays,” she continued, finishing buttoning her gloves. “I don’t know whether I possess the necessary genius, but I shall try. If you are tired of London, Bryan, why don’t you run down to the country for a day or two by yourself?”

  Here was another little tug at his heartstrings. He looked at her reproachfully.

  “Without you?

  “Why, yes. I do hope that you are not going to be sentimental, Bryan!” she said deprecatingly. “If there is one thing in the world which I detest, it is sentiment. Now, see me into the carriage, please. I have to call for Mrs. Forrester, and I am late already.”

  He walked at her right hand down the broad steps, and handed her across the pavement to the perfectly appointed victoria which was waiting at the door.

  “You are dining here to-night, are you not?” she remarked, as she settled herself back amongst the cushions. “Half-past eight, you know. Au revoir!”

  Bryan bowed, and watched the carriage roll away and turn the corner before he moved. Then he followed it slowly westward.

  It was not a pleasant walk for him. The pavement around and by his side seemed peopled with the ghosts of his boyish dreams—the ghosts of those passionate longings which had made music in his heart in those days when he toiled on his claim, spade in hand, on the banks of the Blue River. Their icy touch seemed to be on his spirits and upon his pulses, cooling his warm blood, chilling all his hopes and desires. The fair, proud girl who had wandered in upon his vagabond youth to become the desire of his life, was his own. She had promised to become his wife—she, indeed, regarded him, in her way, as a man for whom it was possible to care. Yet when he had told her of those days of his wild love, and of his joy at this final and almost unhoped-for consummation, she had smiled at him indulgently—had listened as though he were speaking in a language which she scarcely understood. And when he had spoken to her of the future, a future which to him seemed to contain nothing but their two selves, she had told him of her social ambitions and her desire for a “salon.” Well, after all, he was but a novice in the fashionable world for which he had been striving to fit himself. As yet, things were a little obscure to him. He would never believe—no, he would never dare to believe, that because she was a great lady, she was any the less a woman.

  He looked up, vaguely curious as to his whereabouts, and suddenly stopped. Fate had brought him to the one place which, that day at any rate, he would have avoided. He was in ‘Weymouth Street, and only a few doors away from Myra’s rooms.

  Even then he would have turned and walked away, but for a carriage standing outside her door. Something in the liveries seemed to him familiar, and he crossed the road with a heavy frown upon his face. It was as he had expected: the carriage of Sir George Conyers.

  He did not hesitate any longer, but he rang the bell, and inquired for Miss Mercier. “She was in,” the servant answered a little doubtfully, and he at once prepared to follow her upstairs. Just as they reached the second floor, the door of Myra’s sitting-room opened, and Sir George Conyers, hat in hand, appeared in the doorway.

  “Oh, yes. I will not forget. You shall hear from me!” he heard Myra’s voice say from inside. Sir George bowed low, and came out, standing at the head of the stairs to let Bryan pass, and nodding to him with a geniality too obviously assumed. Bryan did not take the trouble to conceal the fact that he was desperately angry, and walked past him into Myra’s sitting-room without returning his greeting.

  Myra was standing with her hands behind her back, looking out of the window. At the sound of Bryan’s step she started round, and gave a little cry.

  “Bryan!” she exclaimed. “Bryan!”

  “Yes, it is I!” he answered gravely. “You seem surprised!”

  The sudden flush of colour faded slowly from her cheeks. She looked at him with a shade of defiance in her manner.

  “I did not expect you,” she said slowly. “I have just had another visitor, you see!”

  “Yes, I met him!” he answered gravely.

  There was a great bunch of stephanotis and lilies on the table, filling the room with a subtle faint odour. He opened the window, and taking up the flowers, threw them deliberately into the street. She did not attempt to stop him, but she laughed, a little hard, unnatural laugh.

  “That isn’t exactly polite,” she said. “It is not every one who thinks enough of me to bring me flowers!”

  “You shall have all the flowers you want, Myra,” he answered quietly, “but not from Sir George Conyers!”

  She shrugged her shoulders slightly.

  “Why not from Sir George? After all, I don’t suppose he’s any worse than the others, is he? Men are all bad! Some are selfish, others are vicious! I don’t see much difference! You don’t know why he came here this afternoon, do you?”

  “I do not,” Bryan answered, “but I can guess!”

  “Exactly. It is not difficult! He came to tell me what I had already seen in the newspapers—about your engagement—and he did me the honour to invite me to become his mistress!”

  “Hound!” Bryan muttered between his teeth. “What did you tell him?”

  Myra drew herself up, and turned towards him. She wa
s wearing a perfectly plain, tight-fitting, black serge dress, which seemed to show every line of her supple, sinuous figure.

  “I told him that I would let him know,” she answered coolly.

  Bryan took a quick step forward. Then he leaned with both hands on the back of a chair, and looked at her.

  “Yes, I told him that!” Myra repeated. “I—Oh, Bryan, Bryan, tell me quickly! Is it true?”

  Her manner had suddenly changed. The mask of callousness had fallen away. She pointed to the papers lying on the table.

  He could not affect to misunderstand her. “Yes, it is true!” he answered.

  “And you are not coming to see me any more?”

  “I did not say so!”

  “But you are not? You love her! You must love her! You cannot care for me, not a little bit—not a little bit. Oh, my God, my God!”

  She sank back on the couch, and covered her face with her hands. Bryan sat down beside her, and then there was a short silence, broken only by the sound of her weeping. A curious sense of perplexity came over Bryan. He would have given the world to have taken her into his arms, and comforted her; to have kissed the tears away, and have brought the smiles back to her cheeks. More than once in the old days he had done it. But now there was this new barrier between them, and he could only speak to her from behind it.

  After a while he spoke. The silence was becoming unendurable.

  “Myra, I am sorry! God knows I am sorry!” he said in a low tone. “I want you to be happy; to find some one who will be good to you, and whom you will care for. But not Sir George Conyers, or any one like him. I know that you are very lonely, dear. I want to alter all that. I am going to speak to Lady Helen. I am going to tell her—that you were good to me at San Francisco, and I am going to bring her here to see you.”

  She suddenly dropped his hands, and fell on her knees at his feet. She dashed the tears from her great beautiful eyes, and held his hands tightly.

  “Bryan, my love, my love, I do not want to see her. I do not want to see any one in the world but you. Listen! Marry her if you love her so much, but promise that you will come and see me sometimes. Love her most—but love me a little! You must, Bryan, you must! If you will do this I do not mind being lonely. I will never speak to Sir George Conyers, or any one else like that again. But you must come, and when you come you must try and imagine that after all you do care just a little about me!”