His Prey Was Man

Chapter I.—At Bay.-1

Chapter I.—At Bay.THE lovely young Mrs. Hilary—she was well worthy of her beautiful Christian names, Jean Madeline—was not exactly an old man's darling, as her husband, Colonel Basil Hilary, was well on the right side of fifty. He was, however, five and twenty years older than she, and when, in her twenty-second year and within twelve months of their marriage, she presented him with a son and heir, he declared himself to be one of the happiest men alive. Certainly he ought to have been a contented one, for, apart from his beautiful young wife and baby, he was in perfect health, of ample means, and the proud possessor of many hundreds of acres of good and fertile land in the county of Norfolk.

One glorious morning in early spring, Jean had gone to look for primroses in one of the woods belonging to the estate, when suddenly a man came out from behind a tree and placed himself in front of her on the narrow path. He touched his cap and remarked briskly, “Good morning, Mistress. It's a nice day for a bit of a walk.”

Of big frame and fine physique, the man was about forty years of age and, with his neatly trimmed beard, was good-looking in a rough sort of way. His eyes, however, were set too close together and his lips were over-full and sensual. He had large hairy hands, the backs of which were tatooed heavily after the fashion of a man who had once followed the sea. He wore a shabby leather jacket and breeches and leggings, and carried a double-barrelled gun upon his shoulder.

Astonished at his sudden appearance, Jean recognised him instantly as her husband's new game-keeper. He had arrived about three weeks previously, but, as it happened, although she had seen him several times at a distance, she had not as yet spoken to him. Now, she returned his good-morning with a slightly heightened colour, not altogether liking his manner, thinking it both bold and familiar.

“I've been on the look-out to catch you for some days,” he went on jauntily, “but I've had no luck.” He screwed his face up into a sly smile. “We've met before, haven't we?”

Jean's breath came a little quicker. “What do you mean?” she asked sharply. “I don't understand you. What do you want?”

“What I mean is,” he replied, and she thought his smile a horrible one, “that we are old acquaintances, and what I want I'll come to later on.” He nodded slowly and impressively. “I remember you, young lady, two years ago at Sutton Coldfield, two years ago this June.”

The effect of his words was startling. Jean's face went white as death, her lips parted, and she stared at him with terrified eyes. Her knees trembled under her.

He laughed lightly at her discomfiture. “Yes, I was the gardener and handy-man at Sister Rowe's private hospital when you came there to have your baby. You've often seen me about in the garden when you were lying out on the verandah as you were getting better.”

Jean was motionless as a graven image. It seemed she hardly breathed. Her lips were still parted and she was staring as if she saw a ghost.

The gamekeeper shrugged his shoulders. “Of course, I looked a bit different then, as I hadn't got this beard.” His horrible smile returned. “But it's me, right enough. Then, Sister Rose's gardener and now”—he bowed ironically—“now your good hubby's gamekeeper.”

She found her voice at last, and though she could not prevent it trembling, spoke sharply and as if in annoyance only. “You are quite mistaken,” she said. “I've never been in Sutton Coldfield in my life. You are mixing me up with someone else.” She made a movement with her arm for him to get off the path. “Let me pass, please.”

But the man made no attempt to move. His face darkened and his voice rose harshly. “Now don't you be a fool, Missy,” he snarled. “Make yourself safe when you've got the chance and no one need know anything about it. I'm not the one to talk if it pays me not to.” He spoke scoffingly. “You were that young Mrs. James there, right enough, and it can easily be proved if anyone wants to. Everyone in the hospital was specially interested in you because we all thought there must be something fishy, as you never had a visitor or received a single letter the whole time you were there.” He seemed very amused. “Not that Mrs. James, eh? Why you made sketches of all the nurses in the hospital and gave them to them to keep, and here”—he laughed derisively—“your hobby is sketching and painting. The servants say you're always making portraits of someone.”

Jean was obviously now in great distress, but for all that her courage was not broken. “I shall speak to Colonel Hilary about you,” she panted, “and you'll be sent away at once.”

Still smiling, the gamekeeper shook his head knowingly. “I guess, my dear, you won't be telling the master anything about me. You won't dare to, for I'm thinking he knows nothing about that pretty Mrs. James whose husband was abroad when her baby died.” He lowered his voice impressively. “Look here, I'm not quite a fool and I've made a few enquiries about the Colonel and you. He'd never met you until about eighteen months ago when he came home from India, and he'd been there ten years. Then you were Miss Castle, no Mrs. about you, and your father was a parson in Devonshire. But you weren't living in Devonshire. No, you were in London, learning painting”—he laughed—“and, it seems, other things as well.”

She spoke hoarsely. “But what are you telling me all this for?” she asked. “What do you want?”

He dropped his mocking tone at once. “Ah, that's the way to look at it, just as a little matter of business between you and me, and nothing said to anybody.” He smiled with an appearance of great geniality. “I'm not a mischief-maker. Not I, I'm a good sport and don't see any harm in a girl having had a bit of fun before she's married, if she doesn't tell anyone about it afterwards.” He eyed her leeringly. “Gee, you're pretty enough to make any man want to fall for you.”

She winced under his glance and, keeping herself from tears with an effort, stamped her foot angrily. “But what do you want?” she demanded again. “Tell me straight out.”

“Five pounds down and a couple of pounds every now and then,” replied the gamekeeper promptly. “Push them under the boards of the swan's house by the lake. Push them down in the corner, and the fiver there this afternoon. It'll come in handy for I want to get some things in North Walsham to-night.”

Her eyes were hard as flint. “Very well, then,” she said curtly, “I'll think it over,” and, with him at last moving off the path, she made to get away as quickly as she could.

“Good-bye, Missy,” he called out grinningly, and then, as if stung to anger by her taking not the slightest notice, he added truculently, “Yes, my lady, and you come here for a walk about this time once or twice a week, so that I can tell you if I want anything more. Now don't you stop away or I shall have to hang round the Hall to get a word with you. See?”

She made no sign, however, that she had heard him and he watched her frowningly until a turn in the path took her out of sight.

“Damn her,” he swore. “She's got a temper and if I push her too much she may do anything. Yes, I must be careful.” He moistened his lips with his tongue and smiled. “Yes, she's pretty enough for anybody, and I wouldn't mind myself, if I——” but his voice trailed away to silence with more moistening of his lips.

As long as she knew he would be able to see her, Jean walked with determined stride and with her head held high, and there was nothing in her poise to betray the dreadful anguish which was possessing her. The moment, however, she knew the trees would be hiding her from him, after one quick glance behind to make sure she had not been followed, she sank down on to the ground and, covering her face with her hands, burst into a flood of passionate tears.

God, what a terrible position she was in! Her secret, which she has so confidently believed had been buried for ever, was known to a common and unscrupulous man, and she was completely in his power! He could wreck her life if he told it, and if he kept silent it would only be at the price of continual, and probably never-ending, blackmail. Either alternative meant the end of all happiness for her. Oh! what had she done to deserve such punishment?

Her mind travelled back like lightning along the years. She thought of her happy girlhood in the old Rectory in Devonshire, her studying Art in London and her going to France for a brief holiday, her meeting there with Paul, the handsome mysterious Paul, and their whirlwind courtship and hasty marriage after only a few days. Then had come the suddenly interrupted honeymoon, and the dreadful disclosures about her husband which had been avalanched upon her. His awful death had followed and, after that, so soon the chilling fear had begun to loom up through her grief that she was going to become a mother.

At first the appalling horror of this realisation had almost made her take her own life, but she had fought against it and in the end pulled herself resolutely together to face the future bravely, whatever happened. After all, she had told herself, Paul had loved her and, whatever he had been, she had loved him in return. So the child would be the token of their mutual passion.

And how cleverly she had managed to keep everything from her relatives and friends! Happily, she had not written of her engagement or marriage to any of them and they had not even been aware of Paul's existence. So, keeping her secret from them all, after his death she had gone up to Sutton Coldfield and lived in lodgings as a married woman whose husband was abroad.

Later, only the matron of the private hospital where she had gone to have her baby and to the doctor who had attended her had she told who she really was, and they both had been kindness itself to her, even to standing as godparents when the child had been christened. Then, the very day when she was to have left the hospital, the child had died suddenly of convulsions, and her grief had been in no wise lessened by the knowledge that now her secret marriage to Paul and its consequences might never become known.

Returning to London and picking up the threads of her work again, less than a year later Colonel Hilary, a childless widower, had come into her life and started to pay great attention to her.

At first she had taken little interest in him and certainly not encouraged him in any way but, warm and affectionate by nature, she had gradually begun to realise it was unnatural for a girl of her age to be condemning herself henceforth to live a loveless life. Besides, and she did not hypocritically hide from herself the fact, a marriage to him would be a splendid thing for her both socially and from a monetary point of view too. He came of an aristocratic family, and was very well-to-do, with an historic old home in Norfolk.

In the end she had let him pay his court to her and, becoming genuinely fond of him, the marriage had duly taken place. Then with the arrival of their child, her happiness had seemed almost complete, her only sorrow being that she had come to her husband in deceit, and in deceit she had continued on in her married life.

So many times she had been on the point of telling him everything, feeling sure he would forgive her. The realisation, however, of what a terrible shock it would have been to him had kept her silent. He was so proud of the reputation of his family and how for generation upon generation the breath of scandal had never been associated with the Hilary name.

All these thoughts surged through her as she sat crying in the wood, and her misery was the more bitter in the knowledge that, confessing everything to him now, he would know she was only doing it because she had been found out and was being threatened by one of his servants.