The Snare Part 25

She approached him again. "Won't you tell me now?" she begged him.

"No," he answered, rising, and speaking with finality. "Afterwards if necessary, afterwards. And now get back to bed, child, and forget the fellow. I swear to you that he isn't worth a thought. Later I shall hope to prove it to you."

"That you never will," she told him fiercely.

He laughed, and again his laugh was harsh and terrible in its bitter mockery. "Yet another trusting fool," he cried. "The world is full of them--it is made up of them, with just a sprinkling of knaves to batten on their folly. Go to bed, Sylvia, and pray for understanding of men. It is a possession beyond riches."

"I think you are more in need of it than I am," she told him, standing by the door.

"Of course you do. You trust, which is why you are a fool. Trust," he said, speaking the very language of Polichinelle, "is the livery of fools."

She went without answering him and toiled upstairs with dragging feet.

She paused a moment in the corridor above, outside Una's door. She was in such need of communion with some one that for a moment she thought of going in. But she knew beforehand the greeting that would await her; the empty plat.i.tudes, the obvious small change of verbiage which her ladys.h.i.+p would dole out. The very thought of it restrained her, and so she pa.s.sed on to her own room and a sleepless night in which to piece together the puzzle which the situation offered her, the amazing enigma of Sir Terence's seeming access of insanity.

And the only conclusion that she reached was that intertwined with the death of Samoval there was some other circ.u.mstance which had aroused in the adjutant an unreasoning hatred of his friend, converting him into Tremayne's bitterest enemy, intent--as he had confessed--upon seeing him shot for that night's work. And because she knew them both for men of honour above all, the enigma was immeasurably deepened.

Had she but obeyed the transient impulse to seek Lady O'Moy she might have discovered all the truth at once. For she would have come upon her ladys.h.i.+p in a frame of mind almost as distraught as her own; and she might--had she penetrated to the dressing-room where her ladys.h.i.+p was--have come upon Richard Butler at the same time.

Now, in view of what had happened, her ladys.h.i.+p, ever impulsive, was all for going there and then to her husband to confess the whole truth, without pausing to reflect upon the consequences to others than Ned Tremayne. As you know, it was beyond her to see a thing from two points of view at one and the same time. It was also beyond her brother--the failing, as I think I have told you, was a family one--and her brother saw this matter only from the point of view of his own safety.

"A single word to Terence," he had told her, putting his back to the door of the dressing-room to bar her intended egress, "and you realise that it will be a court-martial and a firing party for me."

That warning effectively checked her. Yet certain stirrings of conscience made her think of the man who had imperilled himself for her sake and her brother's.

"But, d.i.c.k, what is to become of Ned?" she had asked him.

"Oh, Ned will be all right. What is the evidence against him after all?

Men are not shot for things they haven't done. Justice will out, you know. Leave Ned to s.h.i.+ft for himself for the present. Anyhow his danger isn't grave, nor is it immediate, and mine is."

Helplessly distraught, she sank to an ottoman. The night had been a very trying one for her ladys.h.i.+p. She gave way to tears.

"It is all your fault, d.i.c.k," she reproached him.

"Naturally you would blame me," he said with resignation--the complete martyr.

"If only you had been ready at the time, as he told you to be, there would have been no delays, and you would have got away before any of this happened."

"Was it my fault that I should have reopened my wound--bad luck to it!--in attempting to get down that d.a.m.ned ladder?" he asked her. "Is it my fault that I am neither an ape nor an acrobat? Tremayne should have come up at once to a.s.sist me, instead of waiting until he had to come up to help me bandage my leg again. Then time would not have been lost, and very likely my life with it." He came to a gloomy conclusion.

"Your life? What do you mean, d.i.c.k?"

"Just that. What are my chances of getting away now?" he asked her. "Was there ever such infernal luck as mine? The Telemachus will sail without me, and the only man who could and would have helped me to get out of this d.a.m.ned country is under arrest. It's clear I shall have to s.h.i.+ft for myself again, and I can't even do that for a day or two with my leg in this state. I shall have to go back into that stuffy store-cupboard of yours till G.o.d knows when." He lost all self-control at the prospect and broke into imprecations of his luck.

She attempted to soothe him. But he wasn't easy to soothe.

"And then," he grumbled on, "you have so little sense that you want to run straight off to Terence and explain to him what Tremayne was doing here. You might at least have the grace to wait until I am off the premises, and give me the mercy of a start before you set the dogs on my trail."

"Oh, d.i.c.k, d.i.c.k, you are so cruel!" she protested. "How can you say such things to me, whose only thought is for you, to save you."

"Then don't talk any more about telling Terence," he replied.

"I won't, d.i.c.k. I won't." She drew him down beside her on the ottoman and her fingers smoothed his rather tumbled red hair, just as her words attempted to smooth the ruffles in his spirit. "You know I didn't realise, or I should not have thought of it even. I was so concerned for Ned for the moment."

"Don't I tell you there's not the need?" he a.s.sured her. "Ned will be safe enough, devil a doubt. It's for you to keep to what you told them from the balcony; that you heard a cry, went out to see what was happening and saw Tremayne there bending over the body. Not a word more, and not a word less, or it will be all over with me."

CHAPTER XIV. THE CHAMPION

With the possible exception of her ladys.h.i.+p, I do not think that there was much sleep that night at Monsanto for any of the four chief actors in this tragicomedy. Each had his own preoccupations. Sylvia's we know. Mr. Butler found his leg troubling him again, and the pain of the reopened wound must have prevented him from sleeping even had his anxieties about his immediate future not sufficed to do so. As for Sir Terence, his was the most deplorable case of all. This man who had lived a life of simple and downright honesty in great things and in small, a man who had never stooped to the slightest prevarication, found himself suddenly launched upon the most horrible and infamous course of duplicity to encompa.s.s the ruin of another. The offence of that other against himself might be of the most foul and hideous, a piece of treachery that only treachery could adequately avenge; yet this consideration was not enough to appease the clamours of Sir Terence's self-respect.

In the end, however, the primary desire for vengeance and vengeance of the bitterest kind proved master of his mind. Captain Tremayne had been led by his villainy into a coil that should presently crush him, and Sir Terence promised himself an infinite balm for his outraged honour in the entertainment which the futile struggles of the victim should provide.

With Captain Tremayne lay the cruel choice of submitting in tortured silence to his fate, or of turning craven and saving his miserable life by proclaiming himself a seducer and a betrayer. It should be interesting to observe how the captain would decide, and his punishment was certain whatever the decision that he took.

Sir Terence came to breakfast in the open, grey-faced and haggard, but miraculously composed for a man who had so little studied the art of concealing his emotions. Voice and glance were calm as he gave a good-morning to his wife and to Miss Armytage.

"What are you going to do about Ned?" was one of his wife's first questions.

It took him aback. He looked askance at her, marvelling at the steadiness with which she bore his glance, until it occurred to him that effrontery was an essential part of the equipment of all harlots.

"What am I going to do?" he echoed. "Why, nothing. The matter is out of my hands. I may be asked to give evidence; I may even be called to sit upon the court-martial that will try him. My evidence can hardly a.s.sist him. My conclusions will naturally be based upon the evidence that is laid before the court."

Her teaspoon rattled in her saucer. "I don't understand you, Terence.

Ned has always been your best friend."

"He has certainly shared everything that was mine."

"And you know," she went on, "that he did not kill Samoval."

"Indeed?" His glance quickened a little. "How should I know that?"

"Well... I know it, anyway."

He seemed moved by that statement. He leaned forward with an odd eagerness, behind which there was something terrible that went unperceived by her.

"Why did you not say so before? How do you know? What do you know?"

"I am sure that he did not."

"Yes, yes. But what makes you so sure? Do you possess some knowledge that you have not revealed?"

He saw the colour slowly shrinking from her cheeks under his burning gaze. So she was not quite shameless then, after all. There were limits to her effrontery.

"What knowledge should I possess?" she filtered.

"That is what I am asking."