“By-the-bye, have you seen anything of old M. Bayre and his young ward since we were here?”
Madame stood up and stared at him strangely.
“Oh, haven’t you heard?” she said in a low voice.
Bayre could scarcely keep his voice steady.
“Heard what?” said he.
“Why, the young lady was to be married to a gentleman of the island—this island—a Monsieur Blaise.”
“Yes, yes, so I heard. Well?”
“The wedding was arranged, so I understand; it was to be very quiet.”
“Yes.”
“Well, the young lady has disappeared.”
Bayre started up, his brain on fire.
“It’s not—it can’t be true!” he cried hoarsely.
Madame Nicolaslooked at Bartlett Bayre with a shrewd suspicion in her eyes. It was evident that the young man took much more than the interest of a casual stranger in Miss Eden’s disappearance.
She shrugged her shoulders and shook her head.
“Ma foi, monsieur, I do not myself think it so surprising that a good-looking girl like Miss Eden should object to being married off to a man old enough to be her father, and by no means attractive at that. Not that I have a word to say against Monsieur Blaise, who is a most worthy gentleman, and well-to-do. But one must make allowance for the natural tastes of a young girl, especially of a girl whose father was an Englishman.”
Bayre heard very little of these words, and he presently broke in, with great suddenness,—
“When did she disappear?”
“I understand she has not been seen for three days.”
Bayre rose from the table with a strange look on his face and walked straight towards the door.
“Where are you going, monsieur?” asked his hostess, rather alarmed by the effect of her words.
She knew of the relationship between him and the recluse of Creux, and she felt uneasy lest the young man should take some aggressive action against the magnate, which might possibly get her into bad odour among her neighbours. For, like all the inhabitants of small islands, the natives were clannish, and strongly resented any interference from outsiders.
Bayre had his fingers upon the handle.
“I’m going to try to find out what has become of her,” said he, “and to see the Creux people about it.”
“Oh, nobody fears a tragedy,” she said quickly, though her tone was not particularly reassuring. “It is some girlish freak, no doubt. And in a few days she will return to her guardian’s house, satisfied with having given this little proof of spirit.”
But this suggestion did not satisfy Bayre, who knew more of the sensitive and emotional girl, after two or three short interviews, than the majority of the islanders would have found out in a couple of years’ acquaintance. Remembering as he did the change which came over her after her introduction to her proposed husband, he could not even feel that her disappearance was a matter of great surprise. That she could conceive the idea of running away, either back to the school she had left in France, or to friends in England, seemed to him a perfectly possible thing. Yet surely, if she had followed such a course, she would have been recognised on the journey! The boats were not crowded at that early season of the year, and she was of course well-known by sight to the people whom she must meet on such a journey.
Full of fears which he dared not define, Bayre left the house and made his way towards the harbour. As luck would have it, one of the very first persons who attracted his attention as he approached the quay was the peasant girl who had placed the baby in its basket among the luggage of the three friends. She was some distance away from him, sauntering towards him with a market basket on her arm, and chatting with another girl of about the same age and class. He saw her before she saw him; but as soon as he attracted her attention by quickening his pace to meet her, she stopped, turned pale, uttered a frightened exclamation, then turned and ran away at the top of her speed, her sabots clanking noisily on the ground as she went.
Of course he gave chase. But in a locality where she was at home and he was not, it was easy for her to escape him.
Baffled in his pursuit, and rendered more curious than ever by the guilty knowledge he had descried on her face, Bayre stopped in a chase which was exciting the amusement of casual passers-by, and retraced his steps towards the quay.
He decided that it would not be very difficult to trace this girl at a later time, since it was plain that she frequented the town, even if she did not live in it. In the meantime his first inquiries must be made in Creux.
He got nothing out of the boatmen who took him across to the little island; they had heard of the disappearance of the young lady, and one crudely and callously suggested that she might have drowned herself as the result of a love affair.
It was not gay at Creux! And for a young girl, too! Monsieur Bayre was an eccentric, a droll man! Strange things had happened on the island before. But there—let each man mind his own affairs and the world would go on very well.
Neither of the men would be more explicit than this: they had their living to get, and great part of it was got in the summer time by taking visitors to Guernsey across the water to Creux to see the famous museum, as they called the treasure-filled mansion of the old recluse.
Bayre began to understand how little sympathy he should meet with in the course of his investigations. Whatever freaks his uncle might be guilty of, he was held in reverence here as a Grand Seigneur, a man of wealth, and a source of legitimate income or of splendid charity.
When Bayre landed on his uncle’s little island, his overcoat buttoned up to the chin, his cap well drawn over his eyes, and his body bent to meet keen wind and driving snow, he knew that for all he might find out concerning Miss Eden’s disappearance and his uncle’s eccentricities he must depend upon himself alone.
Nevertheless, he took the strongly-built cottage of Pierre Vazon on his way, although the truth was the last thing he expected to hear from the lips of that unprepossessing person.
The home of the Vazons was a large stone-built cottage, built on a rather bleak spot, and sheltered only by a few now bare trees, and by its own outbuildings. There was nobody to be seen about outside, and it is impossible to exaggerate the desolation of the aspect of the whole island, seen thus through the driving snow, which had already covered the ground to the extent of an inch or so, making the sea around it appear of an inky darkness.
Bayre went boldly up to the cottage and looked in at the window as he passed. And he received a great shock on seeing that Marie Vazon, who was sitting by the window with her sewing, had a child, a well-dressed child, in a cradle at her feet.
Here then was a blow at one of his cherished beliefs. It was Marie Vazon who had charge of his uncle’s infant son, and the identity of the child who had been entrusted to the care of him and his friends was now as mysterious as ever.
As he stopped at the window, gazing in with an expression of bewilderment and dismay on his face, Marie Vazon noticed that a shadow was darkening the window, and glanced up.
He saw a swift look of amazement and alarm pass over the stolid peasant face, and then she looked quickly down again and went on with her sewing.
Bayre hesitated as to whether he should enter the cottage and make some inquiries there, or push on for his uncle’s house. While he debated with himself, he heard a rough voice behind him, and Pierre Vazon came up, greeting him in his Frenchpatois, in a manner half servile, half insolent.
“You are back again soon, monsieur,” said he, placing himself in front of the young man, and looking at him askance. “It is bad weather for travelling now.”
“Yes,” said Bayre.
“Monsieur must have strong reasons to bring him across in the snow and the bitter cold,” went on the man, with scarcely veiled curiosity.
“I hear you have had a strange event since my last visit,” said Bayre, without answering his implied question. “Is it true that Miss Eden is no longer here with her guardian?”
“Parbleu, monsieur, so it seems. We have seen nothing of her for two days. But your English young ladies—and Miss Eden was very English—they are so independent, we were not much surprised to find she had ended by thinking Creux too quiet for her.”
“You mean that no attempt has been made to find her, either by you or by her guardian, Mr Bayre?”
“Well, monsieur, I hunted all over the island for her, and my daughter too, as well as she could. But she has Monsieur Bayre’s child to look after,” went on the man, keeping his interlocutor fixed steadily with his small slits of eyes, “so that she has not much time for anything else.”
It occurred to Bayre as strange that the man should watch him in this peculiar fashion while he made this statement about the child, but he could think of no adequate reason for doubting the truth of his words. At the same time an impulse of curiosity made him ask abruptly,—
“Can I see the child?”
Pierre looked at him askance and shook his head.
He seemed to be searching for an excuse, Bayre thought. At last he found one.
“Since you have not been received by Monsieur Bayre, monsieur,” said Vazon, “I don’t know whether I ought to let you see his child.”
Bayre shrugged his shoulders.
“As you like,” said he.
And turning on his heel abruptly, he saw, as he passed the cottage window once more, that Marie Vazon was no longer sitting within. Looking round, he caught sight of Pierre disappearing hastily within the door of the cottage, and heard him turn the key in the lock. So, with one more look in at the window to ascertain whether the baby in the cradle was really alive, a fact which the infant obligingly proved by thrusting a crumpled fist outside its covering, he started in the direction of the mansion.
What was wrong? What was going on here, in this forgotten little spot of earth cut off by the sea from the rest of mankind?
That something was amiss Bayre was sure. Vague as his suspicions were, impossible as it was for him to make out what it was that he feared, there was such a strangely unsatisfactory atmosphere surrounding Pierre Vazon and his daughter, such a disquieting air of mingled servility and insolence in their address, such an expression of low cunning on both their faces, that the more he considered the matter the more uneasy Bayre became.
That they had had any hand in the disappearance of Miss Eden he did not believe. Why should they lay themselves open to ugly suspicions by interfering with a person who was not likely to stand in the way of their interests? If she had been the darling of her guardian’s heart, and they had suspected him of designing to benefit her in his will to the exclusion of their claims upon him, Bayre might have conceived it possible that the cunning peasants should have motives for getting her out of the way.
But everything went to show that, so far from being fond of his ward, the old man looked upon her simply as a burden and an unwelcome guest, to be got rid of by marriage as quickly as possible.
Far more likely was it that the high-spirited girl, after a scene of resistance to old Mr Bayre’s wishes in the matter of her marriage, had broken the ties between her and her guardian and left the island of her own accord.
But surmise was not enough: he felt that he must have fact to satisfy him. And the person to whom he would apply was his uncle himself. He would not be put off this time. And as he marched up the avenue under the snow-laden branches of the leafless trees, he resolved that he would take no denials, that he would gain admittance by hook or by crook to the presence of the mysterious recluse, and would try to probe to the reason of the strange dislike to meeting him which his uncle had shown.
He pulled the old-fashioned iron handle, and heard the bell clang through the house. Almost without a moment’s waiting he found the door opened; but a new thrill of suspicion and dismay struck a chill to his heart when he found that it was again Marie Vazon who had opened it to him.
His astonishment for the moment took away his powers of speech. She must have run up to the great house while he was in conversation with Pierre. And his hopes of getting admittance grew low as he met her cunning blue eyes and noted that she did not open the door very wide.
She waited for him to speak.
“I wish to see Monsieur Bayre, my uncle,” he said boldly at last.
Marie drew the door a little closer, shook her head, and smiled.
“Ah, monsieur, I regret that Monsieur Bayre cannot receive you—cannot receive anybody. He is ill—ill in bed,” said she.
“Will you take him my card? And I should like to scribble a few words on it first.”
He had taken out his pocket-book and found a card before he perceived that Marie Vazon had deftly and without noise put the chain on the door. Too indignant to say another word, he gave up the intention of writing anything on the card, and merely passing it to the girl through the narrow opening that was left, he went away.
What did this mean?
If he had not remembered that it was his uncle himself who had given the first intimation of his unwillingness to meet him, Bayre would now have suspected that the Vazons, for some reason of their own, wished to prevent the coming together of their master and himself. But with his two attempts to speak to his uncle, and his previous repulsion from the very house fresh in his mind, the young man could scarcely entertain this idea.
What then could be the motive for this marvellous eccentricity? He had never heard, from any of the inhabitants of the islands, a hint that his uncle was other than perfectly sane, or he might have ascribed this shyness to a caprice of insanity.
On the contrary, although all were agreed that his two recent misfortunes, the loss of his wife and the death of his cousin, had had a great effect upon him, yet everybody spoke highly of the old man as a good neighbour and a generous benefactor. How could his nephew’s visit in the company of his two friends be looked upon as an intrusion which justified such persistent and aggressive snubs?—snubs which seemed inconsistent with the known character of the man, and which nothing in his nephew’s personal history could be held to justify.
So mysterious, so incomprehensible did his uncle’s whole conduct seem, that Bayre conquered his first impulse, which was to turn his back upon the house with all possible speed, and resolved instead to play the spy a little, not more in the interests of his own natural curiosity than in his intense desire to learn what had become of Miss Eden.
When he had reached the avenue, therefore, he slackened his steps, and getting through the thin hedge on the left without difficulty, approached the house once more, this time by way of the other side, where a thick plantation had been partly cleared for a smooth lawn which, now an undulating sheet of snow, stretched away from the house to the sheltering wood behind.
A curious building it was, this low-roofed, rambling mansion, which had evidently grown to its present dimensions from a most modest country villa. The original building it was that Bayre came to first, a white-washed pile of simplest architecture, the ground-floor windows of which were closed up with heavy shutters. Most desolate did they look, these long windows down to the ground, with the closed shutters behind them. Beyond these he came to a stone extension, with a row of windows narrow and high, at least ten feet from the ground. He looked up at them with interest. There were no shutters to these, but he could see that there were iron bars on the inner side.
Bayre went further in his search and passed round a protruding wing, beyond which was a courtyard where the stones were moss-grown, little patches of green peeping up between the snow-drifts.
There was a sort of atmosphere about this corner which suggested the home of the sleeping beauty, for the trees had been allowed to grow as they liked, and their branches straggled across the pathway which led from this point through the wood. There was a stable, small for the size of the mansion, as was to be expected on the island: it appeared to be untenanted, and one of the windows was broken. The servants’ quarters, which were at this end of the house, had a desolate appearance. Bayre could hear certain sounds of work going on within; but it was rather the clanking of one pair of sabots on the flagged floor, and the clatter caused by one, or at most two, pair of hands, than the life and bustle of a large establishment.
He turned into the footpath, came upon a stiff-terraced garden with some mournful evergreens and still more mournful statues, and turned back towards the house.
It was that row of long, narrow windows high up in the wall that fascinated him and made him wonder what was behind: for this part of the house looked like a scrap of mediævalism wedged awkwardly between the products of other periods. Here, he thought, must be the treasures of which he had heard so much. As he stood looking upwards and wondering what was within, a strange sound reached his ears, as of the splintering of wood, the rattling of boards, and blows with a heavy instrument upon some hard substance. A movable pane in the window immediately over his head, opened for ventilation, enabled him to ascertain that these sounds came from the interior of the building.
The surface of the stone wall was rough: the young man’s curiosity was great. After a moment’s hesitation he threw his scruples to the winds, and with the assistance of an ill-kept growth of ivy which covered the lower part of the wall under some of the windows, managed to hoist himself to the level of one of them and to look in.
When his eyes, dazzled by the glare of the snow outside, had got used to the obscurity within, he found himself gazing upon a spectacle so strange, so grim, that he began to have a sort of feeling that the cold must have benumbed his senses and distorted his vision, so that real objects took the fantastic shape of things seen in dreams.
In the dimness of an open timber roof he saw winged things fluttering about, perching on the beams, uttering odd little twitterings and cooings in the darkness. On the wall opposite to him there were tapestries, some almost colourless with age, and some beautiful in tints which, in the dim light, all took a softening tone of tender mouse grey. There were glints of steel, too, against these hangings; here and there a ghostly figure in ancient armour, with lance in rest and helmet plumed, stood out from the dim background.
Clinging on with difficulty to the narrow slanting ledge, Bayre looked in with eager eyes, saw these things before him, and at one end, hazy in the distance, a gallery crossing the great hall from end to end, where old silver lamps hung by chains from above, and where the pipes of an organ and the graceful outline of a harp gleamed faintly out of the misty grey.
The other end of the hall he could not see. But he saw pictures hanging below the level of the windows, and on the floor beneath something that groped its way along slowly and painfully like an animal hunting for food.
Dog, or wild beast, or what? For a long time Bayre strained his eyes, unable to make out what that dark object was that groped and groped, at first quietly, and then with a sudden impulse of impatience, in the obscurity below him.
His heart seemed to leap up with an indescribable sensation which was partly horror and partly sheer amazement, when the creature suddenly reared up from the dark boards of the floor and showed the face of a man, withered, haggard, tense with an unearthly eagerness of longing.
“My uncle!”
The words were formed by the young man’s lips, but they did not reach the stage of uttered sound. He was, indeed, too sick with amazement at this uncanny sight to be able to speak at that moment.
Before he quite knew what the impression was which this sight had made upon him, the figure in the old dark coat was bending again upon the floor, and Bayre saw him raise a hatchet over his head and bring it down sharply upon the boards.
That fact was enough. Only one explanation, surely, could there be of the action of a man who would set to work to destroy his own dwelling in such a manner.
But before the young man had had time for another look, another thought, he suddenly found himself seized by the legs from below, and turning, saw that Pierre Vazon, with alarm and dismay on his face, and another and younger man, also in a blouse, had made him prisoner.
Bayredid not wait for a second summons to descend. He kicked himself free of the grasp of his captors and slid down to the ground beside them.
“Mon Dieu!monsieur, this is a strange way to visit a gentleman’s house!” cried Vazon, stammering with indignation and evident alarm. “I took you for a burglar, a thief. What do you want haunting a gentleman’s house when he will not allow you inside?”
“My uncle is mad,” replied Bayre, shortly.
“Mad? No. Not more mad than country gentlemen always are when they live by themselves and have nobody to contradict their whims,” retorted the plain-spoken peasant, scoffingly. “I call it more like madness for a gentleman to play the spy upon his relations and to hang about where he has been given to understand that he is not wanted.”
“I shall have an inquiry made into this,” said Bayre, shortly. “There are others concerned.”
And he walked away without further comment.
That he had alarmed Pierre Vazon by this threat of bringing outside inquiry into the matter was evident a few moments later when Pierre came running down the avenue after him, his manner changed from insolence to abject servility.
“One moment, monsieur,” he cried, gaining his point by his earnestness, and inducing the young man to stop and listen. “Pardon my rough manners if I said anything to displease you. I am but a peasant, with the manners of the soil. Remember, I love my master; I’ve served him many years now, and the thought that he should be interfered with, even in his caprices, seems like treason to me. Look here, monsieur. I know monsieur your uncle is eccentric; everyone knows it. But it is the eccentricity of a good man, a generous one, one with a good heart. If he amuses himself as others do not, where is the harm? Leave him in peace to enjoy the few years of life remaining to him, months only, it may be, for he is old and broken now.”
Doubtful though he was of Vazon’s entire good faith, the young man could not help being touched by his earnestness, and he promised not to do anything rashly or without due thought.
“But mind,” he went on, “I am not going to leave the island again without having seen my uncle and judged of his condition with my own eyes. So I warn you that, when I return, as I shall do in a few days, you had better rather help me than hinder me in my purpose of getting an interview with him.”
The old peasant gave a curious glance at the dark sea, which was already even rougher than it had been a couple of hours before, when Bayre came across from St Luke’s. And Bayre wondered whether the old man was speculating as to the chances of communication between the islands being cut off, as it was sometimes in the winter, by the spell of tempestuous weather.
“Certainly, certainly, monsieur, I will do my best, my very best. And when Pierre Vazon gives his word it is as the word of a gentleman.”
And with this parting speech, uttered with an air of uncouth dignity, raising his cap with great deference, Pierre Vazon disappeared in the direction of his own cottage.
Bayre hastened to the landing-place, where the boat was waiting to take him back. It was a very difficult matter to embark, and the two men in charge of the little craft whistled softly to themselves as they started on the return journey over the wild water, as sailors do under the excitement of a stormy day at sea.
The waves dashed into the open boat, which carried very little sail, for wind and sea ran high; and half a dozen times before the party reached St Luke’s they were threatened with the submerging of the boat.
A little knot of people assembled on the pier to watch the boat as, cleverly handled by the two men, it crested the waves and finally ran into shelter. And there, in the very front rank of the watchers, Bayre saw, to his surprise and delight, the peasant girl whom he wished to trace. He hid his face so that he might get out of the boat without her seeing him. But when he had landed, amidst the congratulations of the fishermen, who told him it was a risky thing to go out in such a sea, the young man was surprised to note that the girl did not attempt to run away on catching sight of him, but stared as if she had forgotten him altogether.
His first thought was that he must be mistaken and that this could not be the girl who had taken the baby on board. But a second inspection made him change his mind; and when she turned slowly away, talking to another girl, and making her way unconcernedly up the town, he followed at a safe distance, quite convinced that he was right after all, and that she was indeed the girl who had avoided him that morning.
She passed from the harbour to the marketplace, and thence up the one hundred and forty-five steps into the New Town, Bayre still following, and wondering whither this expedition would lead him. For he was not without suspicions that she might trick him after all, and that he might find himself at the end of his journey no wiser than at the beginning.
Right out of the town she went, and inland across country that looked bleak and uninteresting, with its scant supply of bare trees and its flat enclosures.
The snow no longer fell, but the wind was still high. And by the time the girl had reached the byway which led to a small stone farmhouse, the day had begun to draw in towards evening.
He lingered in the background till he saw her enter the little dwelling, and then, resolved to find out the truth about the child if possible, he went up the lane and knocked boldly at the door by which she had entered.
It was opened at once—by Miss Eden.
The cry of joy he uttered at the sight of her was so spontaneous, so heartfelt, that the young girl, who was smiling and holding out her hand, blushed and looked down as she met his glowing eyes.
“Come in,” she said.
And then, when he stepped into the beamed living-room, and saw the peasant girl grinning at him sympathetically from the background, he could not doubt that he had been made the victim of a most pleasant little plot between the two young women.
“This,” said Miss Eden, leading him across the stone-flagged floor, with its neat strips of home-made carpet, to a wooden armchair, where an old woman in an all-round white cap sat knitting by the fire, “is M. Bayre’s nephew, Madame Portelet.”
The old woman gave him a smileless but not uncordial welcome, speaking in the muffled tones of the deaf. And then Miss Eden turned to the young girl.
“It was Nini here who led you into this trap, by my command, Mr Bayre.” Nini dropped a curtsey. “When she saw you in the town this morning she came back and reported the fact. And then she went back and decoyed you here.”
Bayre was bewildered. Into all the delight he felt at finding Miss Eden safe and sound there would obtrude the pain of the mystery which surrounded not only her but his uncle and the unidentified baby. He began to feel, too, that he should never have the courage to ask all the questions he would have liked to have answered.
Miss Eden, indeed, led the talk as she liked. He fell instinctively into the position of her adoring humble servant, and accepted the tea she made for him, and the bread-and-butter which she cut with her own hands, without anticipating by so much as a word the moment when she would choose to enlighten him as to her strange position.
The time came at last. Nini had disappeared with the tea-tray into the back regions of the farmhouse, and Miss Eden led him to the window and sat down, while he stood leaning against the opposite end of the deep window-seat.
“You are surprised to see me here,” she said.
“I—I was only too delighted to s-s-see you anywhere,” stammered he. “When they told me you had disappeared, I—I—”
“Did you think I had drowned myself?” asked she with a pretty sauciness which enthralled him.
“I—I don’t know what I thought.”
“What has brought you back here?”
He looked at her, hesitated, and then stammered out,—
“Y-y-you, chiefly, I think.”
“Thank you. But—I don’t understand how I can have had anything to do with it.”
“Did you get my letter?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t answer it. Yet you half-promised—”
“To answer you if you wrote? I don’t remember doing that.”
“No. But you did promise to let me hear of or from you some day.”
“Ah! That’s vague, isn’t it?”
“In the meantime at least—thank Heaven!—you have thrown over old Blaise.”
“How do you know that?”
“Wasn’t it to escape him that you ran away?”
“Not altogether, I think. Though I admit that his likeness to everybody else of his generation was rather excessive.”
“Why have you run away then?”
In the dim light, which came partly from the waning daylight and partly from a dim little lamp, he saw that she grew very pale as she answered,—
“I—I had a fright.”
Remembering what he had seen that day, Bayre was on the alert in a moment.
“Ah!” said he. “Was it my uncle who frightened you? Tell me all about it. Indeed, I know something of the cause already, I think.”
She leaned forward and spoke in a low voice.
“Since you and your friends went away,” she began, “Mr Bayre has shown a strange restlessness and irritability; and instead of merely treating me with indifference, as he did before, he has seemed to take an absolute and strong dislike to me, so much so that he scarcely spoke to me without harshness, or a sort of querulousness still more difficult to endure. And in the meantime the two Vazons, who presume upon having the care of your uncle’s child”—Bayre listened intently to these words, but dared make no remark upon them—“kept more closely about him than ever, and evidently influenced the way he treated me. Naturally I resented this. And I resented, too, the way in which I was being thrown into the arms of this good Monsieur Blaise, who, I must tell you, is by no means so deeply enamoured of my charms as your uncle wished to make out, but who seemed rather to submit to the thought of marrying me than to show any enthusiasm over it.”
“What!” cried Bayre, indignantly. “I can’t believe it! Is he deaf and blind?”
Miss Eden laughed and blushed very prettily.
“I’m sure I don’t know,” said she, “but at any rate you could see for yourself that he is past the age at which a man rushes headlong into matrimony. It seems he made careful inquiries into my ‘dot,’ and was disappointed to find I had only seventy pounds a year of my own.”
“The cad! The rascal!”
“Oh, not at all! Much more prudent than to dash into marriage, as some very silly young Englishmen might do—”
“Yes, yes, so they might—”
“Without making careful inquiries into their responsibilities. Well, he submitted with a good grace to my poverty-stricken condition, and things were in a very nice train, when—when—something happened, something that frightened me.”
“What was it?” asked Bayre, leaning down and guessing what sort of incident it was that had caused her alarm.
“It was something that made me think I ought to have time to find out a little more, and to consult somebody as to what I ought to do. Something which made me wonder whether I should do so wisely as I had supposed in following your uncle’s advice as to my marriage.”
“Yes, yes, go on. You saw something about him that made you suspect—what?”
“Why, that there’s someone living at thechâteaubesides himself.”
Bayre started back, staring at her in perplexity, as the memory of his discovery of that afternoon returned vividly to his mind.
“Someone besides himself! Who?” asked he, sharply.
“I don’t know. But it’s someone nobody knows anything about except himself and the two Vazons,” said Miss Eden. “And—and—I think it’s—a woman.”
Bayre stood up, struck with a horrible thought. Was his uncle keeping his own young wife shut up in his house with himself and the two Vazons for gaolers?
“Tellme all you know about this,” said Bayre, abruptly, when he had silently pondered for some moments on Miss Eden’s statement. “You may trust me. You wouldn’t have told me so much if you hadn’t felt sure of that.”
“That’s true. Well, what I know amounts to very little. But one day, as I was walking in the garden close to that end of the house that’s shut up—”
“Where the windows open down to the ground?” asked Bayre.
“The room next to that one it was, the very last room of all, where there are two windows barred on the outside and shuttered on the inside. You may not have noticed them, for there’s a creeper which has been neglected, a Virginia creeper, on that corner of the house; and the long dead branches hang like great bunches of string down over the windows.”
Bayre remembered the ragged Virginia creeper, though he had failed to notice the iron bars behind them, or the fact that these two windows were shuttered like those of the longer room beyond.
“Well?” said he.
“It was late one afternoon,” she went on, “that I saw the shutters of one of these windows put back and a hand thrust out to open the window. I was startled, and I must have made some sound, for I saw that the hand was a woman’s, and that the fingers were loaded with rings. It was drawn back instantly, and I heard a sort of tussle going on inside the room, and voices speaking low and hurriedly. And presently someone came to the window and looked out: but it was not the woman; it was your uncle. He looked down at me angrily, shut the window and closed the shutters.”
“You asked him about it, of course?”
“I shouldn’t have dared. But he told me, of his own accord, that he had caught one of the maids decking herself out in some jewellery which he kept in a locked-up room.”
“And may not that have been the truth?”
“I don’t think so. There are only three women about the house at any time: Marie Vazon, who is the only one who might dare such a thing, lives at her father’s, and is not very much at the big house at all. The other two are an old woman and her niece, neither of whom dares to stay a minute longer out of the servants’ quarters than she can help. And all three women have hands which are large and red, and the fingers of which could not wear rings of ordinary size. Well, such rings as I saw—valuable as they must have been if they were real—are not made in extraordinary sizes!”
“Do you think, then, that it’s his young wife he is keeping shut up there?”
By the look of consternation which passed over Miss Eden’s face, Bayre saw that this idea had not occurred to her.
“I never thought of that,” she said quickly. Then, as this suggestion seemed to fill her with horror, she cried quickly, “Let’s ask Nini about her. Oh, no, oh, no, I’m sure it can’t have been his wife.”
And Miss Eden rose from her seat, and hurrying across the room, opened a door at the back and brought in the peasant girl with a teacup in one hand and a cloth in the other.
“Nini lived at your uncle’s house all the time from before his marriage till a few weeks ago, when her grandmother had to send for her to come back here to her own home,” explained Miss Eden. “Ask her and she will tell you what she thought of young Mrs Bayre, and whether she was the kind of person who could be shut up against her will. You can ask her in English or French; she speaks both.”
Nini, who looked intelligent for her class, nodded assent to this speech, looking down modestly upon the floor. But Bayre had a sort of idea that, simple as she looked, he should get no one word more out of her than she chose to give. Obediently, however, he began to ask her questions.
“You were at Creux when young Madame Bayre ran away?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you see her run away?”
“No, sir. She took Marie Vazon with her. She had better have taken me. I shouldn’t have left her in the lurch and let her go off without her child as Marie did.”
“Ah! The child! Was that the child you brought on board in a basket and dumped down among the luggage of my friends and me?” asked Bayre, with what he considered to be startling suddenness.
But Nini was on her guard, of course.
“Plait-il?” she asked blandly, raising her eyes stolidly to his face.
“You won’t own to that, I see,” he said irritably. And turning shortly to Miss Eden, he observed, with some constraint,—
“This girl is the heroine of the incident I wrote to you about from London, Miss Eden. It was she who planted a young child among our luggage. I’m sure of it.”
There was a moment’s silence. Nini did not attempt any further contradiction. She looked stolidly down on the flagged floor again and waited for further questions. Miss Eden’s conduct was equally unsatisfying.
“There must be some mistake, I think,” she said. “But, in any case, that’s not the matter under discussion, is it?”
“If she won’t tell the truth in one matter it’s not likely she will in another,” said Bayre, drily.
“Let me try,” said Miss Eden, sweetly, and she addressed the girl at once. “What sort of life did they lead at thechâteauwhen old Mr Bayre brought back his young wife, Nini?”
“It was not very comfortable, mademoiselle. Young Madame did not like Mees Ford, and Mees Ford did not like young Madame. Mees Ford was all for save, save: Madame liked ease, comfort, expense. Madame did not like to see her husband always consulting his cousin instead of her. Madame want her husband always to go away, especially when the baby came. It was not gay for Madame, who was young, to sit always in the greatsalon, the room where the shutters are now always closed, with that effigy, Mees Ford, opposite to her, knit, knit, knitting always as if for her life. One, two, three, four, always, count, count, counting. And poor young Madame sitting opposite, yawning over a book. Even her child was not allowed to be with her much. Old M. Bayre was proud of him, but he did not like the noise of a child’s crying. So it had to be kept in rooms that were a long way off, in the charge of its nurse and of Marie Vazon. And when the child was eight months old the nurse went away and he was left to Marie Vazon only. Madame did not like Marie, and that was another trouble. Mees Ford stood by the Vazons, father and daughter, while Madame hated them.Ma foi, I, for one, was not surprised when Madame ran away. The only wonder was she stood the life so long.”
“Did you ever hear any hint that she didn’t run away after all?” asked Miss Eden.
The girl looked up in real surprise.
“No, mademoiselle,” she answered with the accent of sincerity.
“Do you think it possible that she never went away at all, but that she was kept shut up at thechâteau?”
The girl smiled incredulously.
“Oh, no; even if she was not very clever she would not have let herself be treated so. And besides, it must have been known.”
Miss Eden looked at Bayre.
“Was it jealousy of Miss Ford’s interference, then, that drove her away?” he asked.
“It was the miserable life they all led together,” replied the girl, promptly. “For Monsieur Bayre and his cousin quarrelled—they had always done so even before his marriage, and it was worse afterwards. He liked her, he respected her, but she was avaricious and mean, and so there was always a conflict between him and her as to the things he did. It was a wretched life for young Madame. She was too timid, too gentle to quarrel herself, but she had to listen to it all and to suffer for it.”
“And after she left, did you ever hear anything of her again?”
“Not a word. Monsieur Bayre and his cousin behaved as if she had never existed. At least, as far as we servants knew. They quarrelled more than ever, perhaps, and we saw less of him than we had done before. And when his cousin died in an apopletic fit—during a quarrel one night, I believe—he shut himself up altogether for a time. He was broken, aged; we were sorry for him.”
Miss Eden turned to Bayre again.
“That will do, Nini,” she said.
And the girl dropped them a rustic curtsey and returned to her work in the wash-house.
“She hasn’t told much that I didn’t know before,” said Bayre, drily.
He was offended by the bland impudence with which she denied her own action in regard to the child in the basket, and was inclined to resent the mystification in which he felt sure that Miss Eden had her share.
“Well, no doubt she’s told you all she could.”
“I don’t think so. However, we need not discuss that.” And he prepared to go. “At any rate, I’m thankful to have found you alive and well, Miss Eden.”
“Thank you. You are going?”
“Yes.”
“Shall I see you again?”
There was just enough of something that was not indifference in her voice, as she put the question, for Bayre to feel himself softening against his will.
“Oh, I—I don’t know,” he began. And then he said abruptly, “Do you wish to see me again—before I go?”
She lowered her eyelids demurely.
“Not if you think it too much trouble to come so far out of your way, Mr Bayre.”
“Oh, that’s just what I do feel, of course, that it’s too much trouble,” said he.
Miss Eden affected to misunderstand his tone.
“I thought so. Then good-bye, Mr Bayre.”
And she put out her hand with an off-hand coolness which, although he felt convinced that it was only assumed to annoy and pique him, made him furious.
“Oh, good-bye,” said he, with as little cordiality as was consistent with common decency, as he touched and dropped her offered hand and went to the door.
Miss Eden shut it after him, and he went back into St Luke’s, with just one glance behind which showed him only the closed door and no face at the window, in a state of rage and irritation of the keenest possible kind.
To think that he should have made such a fool of himself as to take this journey, at the risk of giving grievous offence by asking for a second holiday, just to see a disingenuous coquette who led him on only to deceive him. For that she knew all about the trick played upon him and his friends by Nini he felt convinced. Even her light way of passing over the subject was confirmation of that fact.
He wished he had not come. He was no nearer to the truth about the child than he had been before. While his interview with Miss Eden had only served to strengthen the impression she had previously made upon him, at the same time it for the first time raised in him doubts of her frankness.
Why did she make a mystery of the incident of the child? Did she think him incapable of keeping a secret? or did she think that he would resent being called upon to have any share in the safekeeping of the child who was his uncle’s heir?
In spite of the fact that he had seen another child at the Vazons’ cottage, Bayre still thought that the hero of the basket was his infant cousin. But in the face of Miss Eden’s rather haughty silence upon this point he dared not even ask the question. He was so angry and hurt, without quite knowing why, that he told himself he should take no more trouble over the matter, but should go back to London and wait for further developments, leaving Miss Eden to get out of her own difficulties as she might, and his uncle to be dealt with by Monsieur Blaise, who would no doubt in the end make some inquiries and discover the mystery, whatever it might be, that was connected with thechâteauof Creux.
He felt some self-reproach down in the bottom of his heart at the idea of leaving it to a stranger to unearth a family secret. But, after all, he told himself, it was no affair of his, and the man whom old Mr Bayre had chosen for a sort of son-in-law had more reason for interference in the family affairs than a blood-relation who had been kept at arm’s-length.
In this mood he reached St Luke’s and passed an uneasy evening. But with a bright morning came softer thoughts and feelings, so that when he took his early walk, after his roll and coffee, he instinctively went up to the New Town and struck inland in the direction of Madame Portelet’s cottage.
By the luckiest accident in the world—in spite of his stoical resolve to have no more to do with her this was how he described it to himself—he met Miss Eden before he came in sight of the humble dwelling where she had found a temporary refuge.
She blushed very prettily at sight of him, and this fact gave him some secret satisfaction, to counterbalance the remembrance of her cool dismissal of the previous afternoon. But she took care to minimise the effect of this by raising her eyebrows and saying,—
“Then you haven’t gone back yet, Mr Bayre?”
“N-n-no,” said he. He turned and walked in silence for a few seconds beside her. “Are you sorry, Miss Eden, that I’ve not gone back?”
“I’m sorry you don’t seem to have enjoyed this visit as much as you did your last,” she replied discreetly.
“Well, you’re not as nice to me as you were last time, you know.”
“I?”
“Yes. You.”
He was regaining confidence a little. She was so much more coquettish than she had been on his first visit, that it suddenly dawned upon him that there might be a more flattering explanation of her conduct than the one of indifference.
“I’ve had a good deal to worry me since you were here before,” she explained more soberly, almost humbly. “Surely you know enough to understand that. Does a girl run away from her guardian’s house, as I did, without great provocation?”
“Of course not, of course not. Forgive me if, if I seem—seem—”
“I forgive you, certainly. And I can understand the trouble you are in yourself about all this. After all, Mr Bayre is your own uncle, and whatever concerns him, concerns the family, doesn’t it?”
“Yes. I’m glad you feel that. And you won’t think me intrusive if, feeling that, I feel also very much troubled about his treatment of you?”
“Oh, that’s nothing. I shall be all right.”
“Yes, but how? What are you going to do?”
“Well, I’ve written to someone, someone in England, to suggest that I should go there.”
“Let me see you safely to the other side, then—”
“Oh, no, thank you. I must have time to decide if that is best. I have written, and I am waiting for her answer.”
“This is some lady you know well that you think of going to?”
“No, I’ve never seen her,” began Miss Eden, rather reluctantly.
“And you mean to trust yourself to someone you don’t know?”
The tears sprang to the girl’s eyes.
“I have to,” said she, petulantly. “I have no near relations; you might have guessed that, since your uncle, who was only an old friend of my father’s, is my only guardian.”
Bayre’s heart began to beat very fast.
“No friends!” said he in a low voice, which was not very steady.
Miss Eden grew nervous and confused.
“Oh, no, of course I don’t mean that exactly,” she said with a little laugh. “Of course I’ve plenty of friends in one sense. But it is only very particular friends that one cares to live with—”
“But you said you didn’t even know her?” persisted Bayre, grown warm and earnest. “Why don’t you go to some of the friends you do know?”
“Well,” said she, desperately, “I want to be independent. If I were to stay with people older than myself I should have to fall in with their ways, to live their lives, and perhaps I shouldn’t like it.”
“But it would be safer for you, better for you,” urged Bayre, excitedly; “a girl who knows nothing of life, or men and women!”
“Oh, but don’t you think one’s instincts are guide enough? I do. It’s an exploded idea that girls can’t take care of themselves just as well as young men.”
“Oh, no, it’s not,” retorted Bayre, dictatorially. “Come, be advised by me. You can trust me to this extent, can’t you? Let me know where this lady lives and I’ll go to see her, take her a message from you, don’t you see? And I’ll find out all about her.”
“And supposing I were to say she lives in Lancashire, for instance?”
“I’d go just the same,” said Bayre, passionately. “Go straight there the moment I got to England.”
“Would you? Would you really do that? But I don’t see why you should. Why should you?”
There was just enough agitation in the girl’s voice, showing that she was touched, grateful, for the young man to be thrown at once off his balance.
“Because I love you,” was his straightforward answer, uttered in a low voice that thrilled her in spite of herself.
She did not shrink away, she did not answer; but she walked on beside him silently, biting her lip, and looking down. His head was still bent as he tried to look into her face, feeling that he had hazarded his all on one cast and that her next words must make or mar him for ever.
While they were both at white heat, as it were, he in the thraldom of his passion and she held by a pang of new and strange emotion, there fell upon them, like water upon a conflagration, the sound of a thick, husky man’s voice—the voice of a man to whom exercise was a burden and a fatigue.
“Hein!” said the voice.
And at the sound the two young people shivered guiltily and stopped, turning, as they did so, to face the direction whence the sound came.
And on the other side of a low stone wall, where a clump of evergreens had hidden him from sight as they passed, they saw the portly form, the round, red face, and the Panama hat of Monsieur Blaise.
But he was not wearing his blue goggles. He had taken these off and held them in one hand, in order that he might have a clearer and better view of the guilty couple.
Miss Edenrecovered her self-possession sufficiently to hold out her hand. The angry M. Blaise took no notice of it.
“Won’t you shake hands with me? What have I done?” said she.
“What have you done?” retorted the stout gentleman, frowning upon her and her companion with strict impartiality. “That, mademoiselle, is what everybody has asked for two days. It is a strange thing for a young lady to disappear from among her friends.”
“I wasn’t very far off,” said she, humbly. “I was staying at the cottage of the grandmother of one of my guardian’s old servants.”
Monsieur Blaise made a slight motion with his head, which may have meant approval or disapproval, assent or dissent.
“And why, mademoiselle, did you indulge this caprice?”
Miss Eden hesitated.
“May I help to explain?” said Bayre, diffidently.
“And who are you, monsieur?” said the elder man, with some asperity.
“I am one of the nearest living relations of Mr Bartlett Bayre, whose namesake I am,” said the young man, readily.
This information evidently surprised Monsieur Blaise, and somewhat mollified him.
“Then you are a relation of this lady’s also?”
“No,” said Bayre. “But as she is my uncle’s ward, I naturally feel a great interest in her welfare.”
When he came to this point in his speech, Bayre saw that Monsieur Blaise began to look at him askance, so he paused.
“Ah! Ah! No doubt!” said Monsieur Blaise, drily. “And she feels an interest in you, and confides to you only the secret of her hiding-place.”
Both the young people protested in a breath, so volubly, and with so much detail, that they managed to convince the elderly gentleman that Bayre’s discovery of the lady had been an accidental one.
“And why did you go away?” Miss Eden hesitated. “Why, if you wanted to go away, did you not at least letmeknow where you were?”
“The fact is, Monsieur Blaise,” broke in Bayre, “that my uncle’s conduct has been very eccentric lately, and that Miss Eden got frightened. But she doesn’t like to admit the fact.”
The manner of Monsieur Blaise changed and grew expansive in a moment.
“Ah, ah!” cried he, opening his small blue eyes very wide, so that they looked like two glass marbles in an undulating field of pink. “Now I begin to perceive! Eccentric!Mon Dieu, I am with you there. Our friend is eccentric beyond all experience!” He turned quickly to the girl. “Did he alarm you then, mademoiselle, by his eccentricity? What is it that he has done?”
Again she hesitated, and again Bayre spoke for her.
“My uncle showed no violence to her,” he said, “and I think it a pity she ever came away.”
Monsieur Blaise assented vehemently, with so many noddings of his head, that he looked like one of those toy figures whose loose heads swing in an open neck.
“Pity! Yes, yes, it is a pity,” he assented. “If you were afraid, Miss Eden, you should have consulted me. A word to your future husband—”
Miss Eden laughed a little and interrupted him.
“Oh, surely, Monsieur Blaise, you can’t want to marry me still? I am too erratic for you, you know.”
“Erratic, yes, so you are,” agreed the stout gentleman with deliberation. “But,enfin, it must be that one’s wife have some defects! And if one knows them beforehand, one is prepared.”
Miss Eden grew pale with consternation.
“But,” she began in a faint voice.
Before she could get any further, Monsieur interrupted her briskly, and indicating Bayre with a wave of the hand, said, with elaborate courtesy,—
“Ah! Is it that you wish to marry this gentleman?—this nephew of your guardian?”
The blood rushed into her pale face as she drew herself up.
“Oh, dear, no. I never thought of such a thing!” she cried emphatically.
Bayre drew himself up too, and Monsieur Blaise smiled so expansively that the flesh of his large round face rolled up into a succession of shiny pink ridges.
“It is well, it is well,” he said, “but we should be grateful for his excellent suggestion. I agree with him that you should go back to your guardian’s house, and this gentleman and I will discuss the matter of his kinsman’s eccentricity, which is undoubted. In the meantime you need have no cause for alarm while you have two friends near at hand. You are staying in Guernsey, monsieur?”
“For a few days only. I propose to go over to Creux, and to put up at the house of the boatman who lives by the landing-place. He lets lodgings, I know.”
“A good idea!” assented Monsieur Blaise. “In the meantime I should like to have a few further words with you upon this matter, when we have seen this young lady safe on her return journey.”
Miss Eden was taken aback by this sudden settling of her destinies, but she submitted, and returned at once to Madame Portelet’s cottage, to prepare her hostess for her departure. Monsieur Blaise took Bayre confidentially by the arm, and walked with him some distance, talking eagerly, and panting as he talked.
“My dear young friend,” he said earnestly, “I am glad you came here. I have had certain doubts, certain very odd suspicions, I may now confess, about our friend at Creux. With a member of his family who shares my opinion that something is wrong there, I am bold, I am fearless. We will go together, you and I, to thechâteau, we will meet your uncle face to face, side by side.” And he waved his arm in the manner of one who storms a fortress sword in hand. “And we will solve our doubts without delay.”
Bayre caught at this suggestion, which was as opportune for him as for the other. With Monsieur Blaise he would no doubt be admitted to his uncle’s presence, and perhaps he would learn more in a single interview than he would have been able to do in six months of inquiry.
“You have definite suspicions?” asked he.
Monsieur Blaise gave one of his large nods.
“Do you think he is mad?”
“I will say nothing,” said the stout gentleman, “until I am more sure of what I think. In the meantime let us make an appointment. Shall we meet at the harbour this afternoon and cross together in time to reach thechâteauabout four?”
“Just as you please.”
“It is agreed then,” said Monsieur Blaise, who for the most part spoke excellent English, dropping into the French idiom only when he was strongly excited. “Be at the harbour at half-past two and we will settle this matter without delay.”
The appointment made, perhaps Monsieur Blaise forgot all about Miss Eden, for he at once took leave of the younger man and returned to his own house.
Bayre lingered in the neighbourhood, hoping for anothertête-à-têtewith Miss Eden.
He had not to wait long. She came back from the cottage at a brisk pace, with Nini to carry her travelling-bag. She blushed and would have passed him with a smile and a few words of casual greeting, but he would not allow that.
“Send the girl on,” said he, peremptorily, in a low voice.
After a moment’s hesitation Miss Eden obeyed.
“Now,” said he, with a certain imperiousness which surprised himself, “tell me what you meant by being so indignant when old Blaise asked if you wanted to marry me?”
The girl’s eyes sparkled, and she held her head high. He was right, however, in thinking that there was something not discouraging in their expression.
“Well, I don’t want to marry you,” replied she, blandly.
“Wouldn’t you rather do that than marry him? Now, tell the truth.”
“I don’t know what you mean, Mr Bayre, by putting on these stand-and-deliver airs with me. This morning you were quite meek by comparison.”
“Well, you put my back up by the lofty tone in which you told that old fellow that you didn’t want to marry me!” said Bayre, looking down into her face with assurance that surprised himself, as he noted that she was considerably agitated, although she held fast to a light and careless tone.
“Well, I didn’t mean to be rude, but what could I say? Would you have had me tell him that Ididwant to marry you?”
And at last, for a swift instant, she let her bright eyes glance towards his face.
“Yes, that’s just what I would have had you say! At least, perhaps it would have been uncomfortable to say it to him, but I wish to Heaven you’d say it tome.”
Miss Eden shook her head gently.
“That’s not the sort of thing one does in a hurry,” she said. “I don’t know much about you, Mr Bayre.”
“You know a great deal more about me than you do about that amiable pink elephant your guardian chose for you. Yet you were ready, or half ready, to marry him even before you had seen him.”
“Ah, well, that was a different thing. That would have been a marriage of arrangement, in the French fashion, while the other—”
She checked herself, but it was too late. Bayre beamed all over his pale face as he made her stop, and whispered eagerly,—
“Say it, yes, say it. The other—would have been a marriage of inclination?”
But she would not answer him.
“Look, Nini’s dropping my bag!” she suddenly cried.
And with an adroit movement she ran past her companion, and waving him a farewell with her hand, reached Nini’s side and went on without looking back again.
Bayre, however, was not disheartened. He could hardly expect to carry off the prize so early in the fight, but there was something in Miss Eden’s manner this morning which bade him hope. Without being vain he felt that he ought to have a fair chance against the pink elephant.
Monsieur Blaise, however, was quite as fully convinced that Miss Eden was to be his as Bayre was that she inclined to himself. And as the middle-aged suitor and the young one crossed the rough channel between Guernsey and Creux together, Monsieur Blaise entertained Bayre, until he fell sea-sick, with accounts of the changes he contemplated making in his house-appointments in view of his approaching plunge into late matrimony.
The sea was calmer than it had been on the previous day, but the wind had not yet gone down altogether. The sky was grey with clouds, and the sea-birds were whirling wildly round the black rocks about the little island, as the boat was carried on the crest of a wave into the shelter of the little landing-place.
It was a matter of great difficulty to land Monsieur Blaise neatly, for he was demoralised by sea-sickness, and was by no means agile at the best of times.
Once on shore, however, excitement gave him speed, and although he panted a great deal, he managed to keep up a good pace as he and his companion walked together to the house of old Bartlett Bayre.
As he had anticipated, Marie Vazon, who opened the door to them, did not dare refuse admittance to the younger man when he was accompanied by so important a person as Monsieur Blaise. She was, however, in a state of considerable agitation as, after a moment’s hesitation, she turned abruptly and led the way into a littlesalon, where she left them, to announce their arrival to her master.
It was a commonplace room this, with the usual polished floor and simple furniture of a French country house; and it was not until, after the lapse of some minutes, Marie Vazon returned and led them through a long apartment, splendid with pictures, with Louis Quinze furniture, and with Sèvres china in priceless cabinets, that Bayre got his first idea of the treasures shut up in the old country house.
From this room they were shown into a smaller one, handsomely carpeted, and luxurious in glory of embroidered curtains and deep, square, carved armchairs, upholstered in damask of rich hues and surmounted by imperial eagles in ormolu.
Here, with his back to the light, crouching in skull-cap and dressing-gown over the wood fire, was the lean and shrunken figure of old Bartlett Bayre, spectacles on nose, and the eternal pipe in his mouth.
He looked up when they entered, and invited them to be seated, not in words, but by a half-sulky movement of the head.
Bayre sat at a little distance, but Monsieur Blaise, more bold, drew a chair to the side of the old recluse.
“You have been suffering, my friend,” said he.
“Not more than usual. I am getting old, old and broken,” answered Mr Bayre, fretfully, with a glance at his unwelcome nephew. “There are plenty of folk who rejoice in that fact, doubtless,” he added grimly.
Bartlett reddened, but said nothing.
“Ah, well, we must not worry ourselves upon those points,” said Monsieur Blaise, cheerfully. “We have come to congratulate you on having found your niece. She has returned, has she not?”
“Um, I believe so,” replied Mr Bayre, without enthusiasm. “Was it your doing, her going away?”
“I! What a question! No. I told her to come back, and I have come to suggest some final arrangements regarding her marriage with me.”
“Ah!”
As he spoke Monsieur Blaise had gradually drawn his chair nearer and nearer, and young Bayre, watching him intently, was surprised to see a sudden change which came over his fat face when he was close to the old man.
As for the recluse, he kept his eyes on the floor, or on the points of his own slippers, so that he noted nothing of this close scrutiny, of this change of expression on his visitor’s face.
All at once, without the slightest warning, Monsieur Blaise stood up. Bayre, still watching him, thought that he was going to denounce his host where he stood. But instead of that, Monsieur Blaise said abruptly, after drawing one of those stertorous breaths which the slightest exertion evoked from him,—