“I don’t think you need wait any longer,” he said. “There has been a little mistake.”
“Very good, sir,” the man answered dubiously. “Is there any message for Sir George?”
“Yes. You can give him my compliments—the Earl of Wessemer’s compliments, you understand—and say that the note he received this evening was a clumsy forgery. You understand!”
“Yes, my lord.”
The Earl of Wessemer leaned back in his carriage, and lit a cigarette.
“It’s a d—d odd thing,” he mused, as he blew away the smoke, “but if ever I do, or attempt to do a good action, I am certain to be found out. Yet I am glad I went. I am very glad!”
IX. A BROKEN DREAM
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For several moments neither of them spoke. Bryan took off his overcoat, and threw it on the table. Then he stood still, listening to the sound of Lord Wessemer’s horses, as they sprang forward in the street below, and the carriage rolled away.
“Bryan!”
The sound of her voice seemed to awake him from a sort of lethargy. He took a quick step towards her. Her eyes were red and swollen, and her hair was disordered. Yet, with it all, she was superbly beautiful. In her voice at that moment he seemed to recall something of the wistfulness of those far-away days on the banks of the Blue River, and out in the wild sandy desert.
She held out her hands as though to keep him away.
“No; you must not come near me!” she said, in a low, tremulous tone. “You must keep away from me for ever!”
He did not go. On the contrary, he came up quite close to her. Then she saw that he, too, had been passing through some phase of passionate emotion. His strong face was troubled, and yet eager, and his cheeks were unusually pale.
“You have been to Lady Helen!” she said. “She has told you!”
“She has told me everything,” he answered. “I have come straight from her to you, Myra. Now, listen!”
He stood up before her with folded arms, something of the old blunt stubbornness creeping into his face, and betraying itself in his speech. She listened to every syllable. It was the Bryan of those other passionate days who spoke to her—her Bryan.
“I told you in San Francisco that there was a woman in England whom I loved. You remember that?”
She looked at him in mute assent. He did not wait for any other answer.
“I want to tell you about that. I was a vagabond, and she was a fair, proud lady, who only stooped to speak to me because I had saved her life. To me, in those days, she seemed like an angel. In my own imagination I made her an angel. I built up her image in my heart, and the materials were of my own making. The Lady Helen whom I fashioned was my princess, the dream of my days, the desire of my life! Nothing seemed to me to compare with the faint, sweet hope which, in my insane moments, I fondly cherished—the hope of winning her. It was thus with me when I Came abroad. You understand?”
She flashed a look at him from her wet eyes.
“I understand,” she whispered.
Bryan took a deep breath and continued. It was a joy to him to be speaking thus. He felt somehow as though he had fought his way out of the meshes of some silken net. The sound of his own voice was like a strong tonic to him.
“I met you. In a way you gained a curious influence over me, but I set my face resolutely against it. I denied it. I told myself that there was only one woman in the world for me, and you weren’t she. So I left you, ungratefully and brutally, and I came back to England to find myself a rich man. My wealth and Lord Wessemer’s influence helped me on. I felt myself at last climbing up on to the same level as the woman of my dreams. The day came when I attained what had seemed to me to be the desire of my life. Lady Helen consented to marry me.”
“Ah!”
She looked away, but he took both her hands and held them tightly.
“From that moment, Myra, I have been a most miserable man. I have not allowed myself to believe it before, but I know it now. The Lady Helen whom I had won was a very beautiful, and in her way, I believe, a very good woman, but she was as far apart from the Lady Helen of my fashioning as Heaven is from Hell. Day by day I found it out. She has lived, and desires still to live, in an atmosphere of her own—an air I cannot breathe. It has made her conventional, proud, and narrow, conscientious but full of prejudices, without passions or without sympathy. For a puppet of noble birth she will make an excellent wife; but she will never be mine. We have parted, and she is going to marry His Grace the Duke of Devonport.”
A great wave of emotion swept into Myra’s face. She took a quick step backwards, and looked at him as though scarcely yet comprehending.
“To-night came my release,” he said. “I spoke to her of you. She interrupted me. You had been to her, and she told me the manner of your reception. She added that she feared that our engagement was a mistake. Our views of life and our tastes were altogether too far apart. And I bowed my head, and my heart said ‘aye!’ I knew then that my idol was a creature of my own making. She had never existed. My heart was free from her, and, Myra—I found that it was not free after all, for I had given it to you.”
He took her into his arms, and with a low, deep cry, she gave herself up to his embrace. The joy of that moment was worth the sorrows of a lifetime to her.
“Are you—quite sure, Bryan?” she whispered.
“Quite sure,” he answered confidently. “I am going to take you away into a new and a greater world; and we are going to be very happy indeed.”
They sat talking softly together till the streets below were silent, and the fire burnt out into white ashes. Then Bryan tore himself away, and walked homeward through the empty streets, in the twilight before the dawn. From his couch he watched the sun rise slowly over the great slumbering city, and then, with a deep sigh of content, he closed his eyes and slept.
* * * * *
Myra, too, watched it from her lonely chamber window, and the faint silver rays stealing down upon the dark, sad city, were like a sweet omen of the days to come. And indeed their presage was a faithful one. For the sun which had risen in her heart shone there for ever, without any cloud or any twilight.
X. IN THE GREATER WORLD
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“At last, Bryan! I can see the buggy and the waggon. Look!”
She passed the glasses to her husband, and he held them to his eyes long and steadily. Then he put them down. “Yes, he is there,” he said.
They stood hand in hand waiting, and the soft west wind came from over the hills and fanned their faces. They were upon the piazza of a dainty little chalet built out upon a ledge of the mountains, and almost overhanging the great Redstone Park valley. Above them towered the snowcapped mountains, and all around, the lower hills lifted their pine-topped heads to the blue sky. At their feet was a wonderful panorama of valley and broad virgin country stretching away in a great plain to the misty horizon. Bryan was wearing a suit of white flannels, and he took off his cap to let the breeze sweep through his hair.
“This is the loveliest spot in the world!” he exclaimed. Myra laughed.
“And you have never found it dull? You, a man of fashion!”
“Never!” he answered gladly. “We have been very happy here, dear!”
She looked up at him with a soft gleam in her eyes, and a wonderful smile on her lips.
“It is like Paradise, Bryan!” she said. “But I think that we should have been happy anywhere!”
Nearer and nearer drew the little chain of vehicles, making their laborious way up the mountain. Through the glasses they could now see distinctly the figure of their approaching guest.
“Bryan, I have something to ask you!” his wife said slowly. “It is a great thing. I want to ask it you before Lord Wessemer gets here!”
“You’ll have to be quick, then!” he answered, smiling. “They’re at the bend now coming round the head of the gorge. How well he looks!”
“It is about that thing wh
ich he desires so much—that you will bear his name, and call yourself his son.”
He shut the glasses up with a snap.
“I cannot do that, Myra!” he said quietly. “I can forgive him, and I can even love him. But—”
She laid her hand upon his arm.
“One moment, Bryan!” she pleaded. “I am going to raise the curtain, just a corner of it, behind which all is blank for us. You remember—that night. You never quite understood why Lord Wessemer was with me, did you?”
“No, I never did!” he answered.
“I want to tell you! He came to me because, from a man’s careless talk at his club, he knew that in my despair I was giving myself over, body and soul, to death. I was mad that night, Bryan, and I had promised—to have supper with Sir George Conyers. Lord Wessemer came to me, and in a few gentle words he made me feel quite a different woman. He came of his own accord, and he saved me! That is why I am angry when I hear any one call him cynical, or blasi, or selfish! That is why I shall always love him next to you, Bryan!”
He stooped and kissed her, heedless of the ascending cavalcade.
“I am glad that you have told me this, Myra,” he said. “It shall be as he wishes! Come!”
They met on the lawn amongst the flowering azaleas, and under the shadow of the pine-trees, through which were little flower-framed peeps of the valley below.
“I am a reformed cynic,” Lord Wessemer laughed, as he held out his hands to them. “I shall sneer at Arcadia no more! It is here!”
Later, as they sat on the piazza, and watched the fireflies dart through the sweet-scented twilight, he spoke wistfully of that great desire which had brought him from England, a suppliant. And Bryan held out his hand through the gathering gloom.
“It shall be as you wish, father!” he said quietly. “Myra wishes it!”
Lord Wessemer bent forward, and through the darkness their eyes suddenly met—Myra’s and his. They understood.
THE END
The World's Great Snare Page 30
