Olwenhad started to her feet in amazement and perplexity. Bayre led the fainting lady to a sofa and made her sit down. Both were too much occupied with her to pay much attention to old Mr Bayre, who, on meeting the visitor’s eyes and hearing her scream, had promptly relapsed into his former huddled-up condition in the armchair.
Olwen went down on her knees beside Miss Merriman, took off her travelling cloak and loosened her dress. Bayre, looking round for something that might prove helpful in the emergency, saw a bottle of strong smelling-salts on the dressing-table at the far end of the room, and bringing it back with him, gave it to Olwen.
“It’s all right,” cried the girl, “she’ll be herself in a minute. Fetch a little water.”
Bayre looked round him once more, and an exclamation broke from his lips. The armchair in front of the fire, in which his uncle had sat huddled up, was empty.
Olwen looked round too and noted this fact, And her eyes met those of the young man.
“What is it? What does it mean?”
“Hush! she’ll be able to tell us in a minute. There’s something very strange under all this,” said he.
They could hear the noise of someone moving about in the small adjoining room where old Mr Bayre kept some of the most valuable of his curiosities, and they guessed that the old man himself was there, within hearing. So they said nothing more for a few minutes, until, indeed, the colour began to return to Miss Merriman’s face and she sat upright. Then she brushed them aside and looked towards the armchair.
“Where has she gone?” asked she in a hoarse voice.
Olwen and Bayre looked at each other, the girl growing suddenly paler, the young man too much mystified to speak.
“Where is she?” repeated Miss Merriman in a whisper.
“She!” stammered Olwen.
The visitor nodded.
“Do you mean my uncle?” said Bayre, in impressive, deliberate tones, thinking that the shock of the meeting had affected her to the point of making her hysterical.
But Miss Merriman sprang to her feet, and searching every corner of the room with her eyes, said, in a low voice indeed, but quite distinctly, quite sanely,—
“No, I don’t mean your uncle. I mean your uncle’s cousin—Miss Ford.”
Olwen started to her feet.
“I thought you were going to say that,” she said.
“What?”
She turned to him with excitement. Miss Merriman seemed still too much agitated to be talked to.
“Yes. The idea only came into my head a moment ago. I think I understand now the mystery of the woman hidden in the house.”
Bayre could not yet understand.
“What is all this about a woman?” said he. “I see no woman, I see no Miss Ford. Can’t you speak more plainly?”
Before she could answer they were all startled by a mocking, harsh laugh, and turning towards the spot whence it came, they saw, standing in the doorway between the bedroom and the small apartment adjoining, a quaint, weird figure. While the short, sparse grey hair, the hatchet face, pale, lined and wrinkled, were those of the old man they had seen huddled up in the armchair a few moments previously, the rest of the figure, now clad in a woman’s bodice and skirt of rusty black alpaca, drove home to them all with startling distinctness the fact of the fraud which had been played upon them.
“Miss Ford! It’s Miss Ford!” cried Miss Merriman, almost in a scream. “Where is my husband?”
“He’s been dead for a good many months now,” was the cool reply of the queer figure in rusty black, in the same hard, masculine tones which had so effectually helped her in her long imposture. “You’ve been a widow, my dear, ever since the early summer, ever since the night whenI, his cousin and your devoted friend, was supposed to die.”
The cynical effrontery with which the old woman thus confessed the imposture she had practised had such an effect upon them all that it was some moments before they could speak. Miss Ford, meanwhile, with her faded eyes, her cadaverous hatchet face, and her attitude of callous defiance, was the only self-possessed person in the room.
“Ha! ha!” laughed she again. “To think what a pack of fools you all were, to be outwitted so easily by an old woman! Why, it’s only a chance that has found me out now; neither you,” and she looked scornfully at Bayre, “nor you,” and she looked still more scornfully at Olwen, “would have found me out but for this accident of Mrs Bayre’s turning up! Well, it doesn’t matter now; I’ve played out the game. I made up my mind I’d never be turned out of thechâteauwhile I lived, and I’ve kept my word, in spite of my cousin’s intentions, in spite of everything and everybody.”
It was a shocking and pitiable spectacle, that of the fierce old woman struggling between her determined will and her physical weakness. For even as she finished speaking, her voice broke and she staggered rather than walked back to the old armchair which she had quitted in male attire a quarter of an hour before.
A glimmering of the truth as to the reason of this most singular fraud had by this time reached the minds of two out of the three persons present. Mistress of Creux Miss Ford had been during her cousin’s bachelorhood; mistress she had continued to be, at some cost of personal cruelty, during the unhappy reign of her cousin’s young wife; mistress she had contrived to be, through gross imposture, up to the end. For that the end was not very far off for her was clearly apparent to those who looked at the ash-coloured face and the sunken eyes, and who heard the broken voice and laboured breathing of the indomitable woman.
“Blaise knew you then!” cried young Bayre, suddenly. “That’s what he must have found out when he came here with me!”
Miss Ford smiled feebly.
“Well, I believe he did find me out on the day he came here with you,” she admitted. “Recognised me, I fancy, by the mark I have here on my forehead.” And she indicated with one of her lean fingers a mole that grew almost under the hair over her right temple. “I could pass well enough for my cousin with my cap on; but in a room it’s more difficult. Still, it didn’t much matter, for Monsieur Blaise didn’t dare to ‘give me away.’ ”
“And the Vazons knew you, of course?”
“Yes, the rogues! They knew it and made me pay for it. But after all, in spite of their threats, what good have they done themselves by their knowledge? I’ve no doubt they have tried to make capital out of the truth over in Guernsey; but who’d believe it?”
Bayre was amazed, almost to the point of admiration, at the old woman’s audacious cunning. As she said, the story was too inconceivable to be readily believed, especially after this lapse of time. She took a pride in her deception, and the silence which followed her speech was presently broken by herself with a quiet chuckle of pride at her own cleverness.
“Yes,” she said, nodding her head two or three times towards the fire, at which she was warming her thin yellow hands, “there was no fear of my being discovered by anybody about here when they had once got used to the sight of poor old Monsieur Bayre, so broken down with grief at the loss of his cousin and of his beautiful young wife”—and she looked round to throw a vixenish glance at Miss Merriman, who was sitting in a state of stupefaction beside Olwen on the sofa—“that he seemed ‘quite a different man!’ Ha, ha, ha!”
Bayre remembered his first impressions of the shambling figure which he had taken for that of his uncle, and he realised the improbability that anyone should descry feminine attributes in that creature with the large masculine features, the masculine walk, with the pipe between its teeth and the peaked cap drawn over its eyes.
The silence was broken by Olwen, who suddenly cried,—
“Then the woman shut up here, hidden away, the woman whose knitting-needles I used to hear, was—”
“Eliza Ford,” croaked the impostor with grim enjoyment. “I couldn’t give up my knitting, and I was not above certain little feminine vanities.” She suddenly burst into another grim laugh, and turning round to Olwen, said, “You saw something one day, didn’t you? You saw a hand covered with rings at the window of the old powdering-room. Well, that was mine. I used to vary the monotony of being a shabby old man by hunting about in the old wardrobes and decking myself out in what I found there and in the jewel-cases! Strange freak at my time of life, eh?”
And she suddenly turned upon them with an air and tone so masculine that Bayre found himself shivering at the uncanny sight and sound.
“And you, young sir,” she went on, turning to him, “you remember the surprise visit you paid me one night, and the pleasant promenade we had through the rooms?”
“I remember,” said Bayre, with a strange feeling of sickness from the shock and the memories combined.
“And I’m sure you can’t have forgotten how we came to a room, the old powdering-room it was, where feminine finery lay strewed about in all directions, and where you found that one of the dresses was warm, as if it had just been taken off?”
Bayre nodded.
“Well,Ihad just taken it off, I, Eliza Ford; and it was I who had been amusing myself with all the trumpery you saw about—high-heeled shoes, fans, false hair, and the rest. Oh! it was a splendid farce to watch your face, and to linger and speak loud, and try to trick you into thinking that there was some young beauty in hiding about the place! Oh, I enjoyed the fun amazingly!”
“You didn’t show yourself very grateful,” said Bayre, drily, “to judge by the act Miss Eden surprised you in!”
The old woman grew suddenly grave, and from mocking her tone grew malicious.
“Grateful? No. I hated you. I would have killed you if I could,” she said spitefully.
“But why?” asked he, astonished at what looked like the outburst of a malignant old witch.
But to this question she made no answer. And yet, after all, the aversion she had shown him was the most surprising part of the whole matter.
He tried another question.
“What was it I saw you hunting for that day in the great hall,” asked he, “when you appeared to be tearing up the boards of the floor?”
Her face grew sombre again.
“Oh,” said she, after a pause, “I was looking for something, something that had been hidden from me, something I wanted to find.”
A light came into Bayre’s mind.
“Was it your cousin’s will?” asked he, sharply.
By the convulsive movement which passed through her he knew that he had made a good guess.
“If so,” he went on very quietly, “you didn’t succeed in finding it, I know.”
Into the wicked old leathern face there came a look of malicious anxiety, and Bayre began to understand things more clearly.
“I suppose,” said he, “that my uncle made a will which did not please you, and that he would not let you know where he kept it, and that it was because you knew its provisions that you determined to carry out this fraud. You were alone with him when he died—”
“Do you mean to insinuate?—” she began fiercely.
“No, of course not. I only insinuate that you took advantage of his sudden death, and of the fact that communication with Guernsey was cut off at that time, to work this deceit. The story runs that Miss Ford’s body in its coffin was carried away at the upsetting of the boat which was to take it across to Guernsey. Is it of any use to ask you the truth underlying that fiction?”
“Your uncle lies buried in the wood outside thechâteau,” said Miss Ford, simply. “I did all the work myself; the Vazons may know where he lies, but nobody else does. I cut a cross in the bark of a beech tree near the head of the grave.”
Cunning as the woman was, adept at deceit as she was, Bayre saw no reason to doubt the truth of this account, which he indeed subsequently verified. There remained the matter of the will.
“I suppose,” he said, “that if my uncle had left thechâteauto you for life you would never have done this extraordinary thing?”
She shot at him a suspicious look.
“We need not discuss that,” she said. “Ihaveenjoyed thechâteaufor my life, and it will belong to his son when he is of age. The matter, after all, does not interest you.”
“Supposing,” suggested Bayre, “that I had been mentioned in the will? Supposing I had been appointed guardian of the child and custodian of my uncle’s collection?”
The old face looked livid in the shadow.
“We needn’t waste time supposing things,” she said presently. “The will has been destroyed.”
“Ah!” said Bayre.
“Not by me,” retorted the old woman, quickly. “What I should have done with it if I had found it doesn’t concern you or anybody now. As a matter of fact, it was hidden away by old Bartlett Bayre in a garret among some lumber, and was enclosed in an iron box. The Vazons stole the box with other things, and it was found broken open in their cottage by Jean, who found also the ashes of the papers that had been locked inside.”
“Not all of them, I think,” said Bayre, in a low voice.
He was beginning to feel rather afraid of the effect which the discovery of the will in his possession might have upon the old woman. Wicked, grasping, malicious and deceitful as she was, he was not anxious for the occurrence of another tragedy before his eyes.
But his words were enough to wake all her suspicions. Half-rising in her chair, leaning on the arm of it, she hissed out at him,—
“Let me see it! Let me see it!”
“Not now,” said he, gently but firmly; “you shall see it another time, in the presence of your solicitors and mine.”
One more doubt she had to satisfy, and only one.
“What was the date of it?” she asked sharply.
“April the 30th of last year,” answered he at once.
She asked no more questions; she was satisfied. Passing one thin hand restlessly over her face she sank back almost lifeless in her chair.
Itwas plain to them all before the day was over that the discoveries of the morning had hastened the end of the impostor who had passed so long as old Bartlett Bayre.
She would not suffer Bayre himself to come again into her presence, nor would she allow the name of her cousin’s widow to be mentioned before her. Arbitrary and eccentric to the last, she made a favour of permitting Olwen to wait upon her, and when, on the following morning before daylight, she passed quietly away, only Olwen and Madame Portelet were in the room.
Nobody could help feeling that her death was the best way, for herself as well as for others, out of the difficult position in which she had placed herself; and when the doctor and the lawyer, who were summoned from Guernsey, not in time to see her in life but in time to learn the extraordinary story while she lay dead in the great dark room, met Bartlett Bayre and the two ladies in one of the saloons downstairs, there was much discussion as to the best way of making known the truth to the world.
For it could not be kept hidden. Already, as they knew, there were rumours abroad in Guernsey, spread by the Vazons; and now the burial of Miss Ford and the re-burial of old Bartlett Bayre would of necessity set folk talking.
It was arranged that these gentlemen should take upon themselves the responsibility of giving the whole truth of the strange tale to the little world of the islands. And they could only hope, for the sake of the family credit, that it would not get into the English newspapers.
When the will came to be read it was found, as Bayre already partly knew, that the estate and collection of old Bartlett Bayre had been left to his son, who was to remain during his minority in the guardianship of his first cousin, Bartlett Bayre, junior.
In his care also the precious collection was left, and it was expressly stated that Miss Ford (of whose indifference to his collection the old man complained) should leave thechâteauand retire to a house belonging to her cousin in Guernsey.
There was no mention whatever of his young wife in the will of the old gentleman; he had treated her as if she did not exist.
It was not until after the reading of the will, when the lawyer and the doctor had gone back to Guernsey, that Bayre, for the first time, found himself alone with Olwen. Mrs Bartlett Bayre, in a very subdued and tearful condition, had stolen out of the house by herself on the first opportunity.
Then for the first time Olwen grew absurdly shy and began to talk about the weather.
“Oh, we can leave the weather alone for a little while,” said Bayre, coolly. “We have other things to discuss—novels for one thing.”
She grew very red.
“Oh, I was so sorry afterwards that I troubled you with my nonsense,” she said with an assumption of indifference. “You can send it back to me; I’ll give you the stamps; or—no, you can put it into your waste-paper basket—or—”
“Thank you—so much,” said he, “for both those suggestions. You may give me the stamps if you like; I never refuse postage stamps. But it would be a pity to put your manuscript into the waste-paper basket, for I heard on Friday night that it had been accepted by a publisher, who, by-the-bye, has rejected everything he’s seen of mine.”
The girl was transfixed with delight.
“Ac—cepted,” faltered she, “really and truly accepted! Do you mean that they’re going toprintit?”
“Print it, bind it, and put your name on the back in gilt letters,” replied he. “More than that, they’re going to pay you for it.”
Olwen clasped her hands; she almost staggered with delight.
“Oh, no! oh, no!” she whispered ecstatically; “it’s too much, it’s too much!”
“Well, I don’t know about being too much,” said Bayre, reflectively. “I shouldn’t like to write many novels on the same terms if I had nothing else to live by. Of course, they say it’s immature and crude, and the work of a beginner: those are the excuses they make for offering you only ten pounds for it. But poor as the pay is, I should advise you to take it; it’s a beginning, you know.”
“Take it!” cried Olwen, incredulously. “You think it necessary to advise me to take it? Why, why, it’s magnificent, colossal! Didn’t Milton only get five pounds forParadise Lost?”
“Ah, but that was poetry, and Milton was different,” said Bayre.
She laughed joyously.
“Oh, Mr Bayre, I can never thank you enough. You’ve given me more happiness than anybody else has ever done in all my life.”
He made a rush for the opportunity, but before he could more than open his lips she checked him by an abrupt turn in the conversation.
“Isn’t it dreadful about poor Mrs Bayre? That she should be left without a penny?”
“Well, she ran away, you know.”
“Well, but he did everything to prove that he wanted her to. I’ve heard a great deal about it, and I know that life was made unendurable to her here. It seems a dreadful thing that he should have died without forgiving her, or making any provision for her.”
“Well, as a matter of fact, he probably knew that where her boy was she would be, and that the same hands that cared for the boy would care for her.”
“Oh, yes, yours,” said Olwen, with sudden coldness.
“Yes, mine,” acquiesced Bayre, buoyantly. “When he’s treated me so handsomely, and placed such confidence in me whom he could only remember as a boy, the least I can do is to carry out what I’m sure were his wishes.”
“Oh, yes, of course. You will have to live here, will you not?”
“I’m not bound to, but that seems to have been my uncle’s wish. He has left money to be devoted to the upkeep of the place until the time his son comes of age, and that fund is to be administered by me. And besides that, as you heard, he’s left me ten thousand pounds.”
“You’ll be quite rich. You’ll marry her, of course?”
“That would be the simplest way of settling things, if it could be managed, wouldn’t it?” said Bayre, demurely.
“Certainly. It would be a perfectly charming arrangement. I congratulate you already.”
Her manner was very haughty, and flighty, and cool.
“You’d better wait till she’s accepted me, or at least till I’ve proposed, hadn’t you? It’s dangerous to congratulate too soon. Supposing it were to come to nothing, you know, I should feel so foolish, after receiving your congratulations.”
“Oh, but it sha’n’t come to nothing. I’ll speak to her for you myself.”
“You dare!” said Bayre, simply.
And Olwen began to laugh under her breath. He caught her by the wrist.
“Are you going to wait, Olwen, till you come across a fellow like the hero of your book?” asked he, in the driest of dry tones.
She bit her lip, and looking down, struggled to get away.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said she, quickly; “men outside books are never like those inside them. It’s useless to expect it.”
“I think so too. Better give up all hope of meeting a paper-and-print hero, and settle down with a harmless, commonplace ten-thousand-pounder, who can turn his back upon the jerry-built flat and the villa one-brick-thick.”
“Why, it is a romance, a real romance!” murmured the girl, softly, when he had kissed her for the second time.
“But it isn’t all your own, remember. I had a hand in this too. It takes one for the romance of the pen, but two for the romance of a kiss.”
And they laughed softly over the little joke, and, laughing still, reached the avenue of the shut-up house.
Little as they loved or respected the memory of Miss Ford, they felt bound to remain in the island until the double interment had taken place at Guernsey of that lady and of old Mr Bayre, whose rude coffin was unearthed and transported with that of his cousin to the larger island, where the strange events of the past few months had caused such a buzz of scandal that the three young people were very glad when the sombre ceremony was over and they could get away to London.
It was on the Wednesday that they arrived in town, and Olwen accompanied Mrs Bayre to her rooms, where she was to stay with her and the famous baby for the present.
It was arranged before they left Bayre that the two ladies should honour the Diggings with their presence on the following afternoon, and that they should bring the heir of Creux with them.
The Diggings, therefore, on the day of the festivity, were a glorious sight. Cut flowers were not enough. Palms and ferns and other plants were bought, their pots were decorated with silk handkerchiefs of artistic colourings, and they were arranged about the room in every available space, until there was not a corner anywhere that you could find room to place so much as a book or a plate upon.
Although it was a mild day, the fire was made to roar up the chimney, with the well-meaning belief that ladies and children were hothouse flowers, who throve best in excessive warmth.
Tarts, cakes, sweets and delicacies of all kinds were ordered in such abundance (the young men considered it mean to order less than a dozen of any one thing) that Mrs Inkersole grew quite pathetic, and warned them that in a week of living on nothing but pastry they would never be able to eat it all up.
To suit the Gargantuan appetites they supposed the ladies to possess, tea was ordered, and milk and coffee, on the same magnificent scale, so that the preparations resembled rather those for a glorified school treat than the entertainment of two ladies and a child whose age was still reckoned in months.
But none of the three saw anything absurd or unnecessary in all this, but rather troubled their heads lest something should have been forgotten than asked whether they had provided too much.
Jan Repton’s bedroom-studio was transformed into a bower of strongly-perfumed hothouse flowers for the ladies to take off their hats in, although even Susan reminded them that ladies kep’ their ’ats on to tea.
They silenced her with scorn, and went their own way unheeding.
And when at last, with a modest ring, the two ladies and the baby arrived and ascended the stairs with soft tread, and were ushered into the presence of the three hosts, one would have thought that they were three smug young curates or mild-mannered Y.M.C.A.’s, so trim and still and subdued were they after all the fuss and the fluster, the fuming and the shouting, the running about and the hiding away that had been going on for hours before.
The ladies, too, were very quiet and rather shy, and Mrs Bayre, in particular, kept her eyes fixed upon her little boy with maternal pride, which struck Southerley as being rather forced.
When the door and a window had been opened to cool the appalling atmosphere, however, and they had all sat down to tea, not in the orthodox fashion in twos and threes about the room, but upon Bayre’s advice, to an honest round table, they presently began to lose a little of the stiffness which had characterised the proceedings at the outset, and at last Jan Repton, suddenly plunging, as men do, from acute shyness to confidence even more acute, turned to Mrs Bayre and said,—
“Look here, Mrs Bayre, I don’t think it’s fair that I should be left out of the general post. If Miss Eden takes Bayre, and Southerley takes you,Imust have the baby!”
For one moment the consternation which followed this audacious and awful speech was too deep for words. For, be it noted that Southerley and Mrs Bayre had conducted themselves from the outset as strangers of the deepest dye, and no one ignorant of recent events would have thought it possible that there was any feeling in either of them of a sentimental nature towards the other.
These terrible words, however, caused them to look up, to catch each other’s eye, to look down, to laugh feebly, to “give themselves away” in a manner which would have tortured a person of finer feelings than Repton.
The artist, however, was conscious only of a pause, a ghastly silence, and he went on, with the utmost cheerfulness,—
“Come, Bayre, come, Southerley, that’s fair, isn’t it?”
For one moment Southerley’s fresh-coloured face showed symptoms of apoplexy. The next, an inspiration seized him.
“Mrs—er—Bayre,” he said solemnly, “let us discuss the proposition of this frivolous person.”
And with that he rose, and with courage which he had never shown before, and which he was never in his life to show again, he deliberately left his chair at the other side of the table and took one next to her. And she laughed prettily and fell in with his humour, and affected to turn her back upon Repton and to devote herself to serious discussion with him.
And that the discussion really did become serious may be supposed, for during the rest of the evening these two were never very far apart.
Presently a sense of something having happened stole over the assembly, and Repton found himself, with brilliant indiscretion, discussing the secretly-arrived-at situation with the same outspokenness as before.
“It now becomes a serious question,” he urged plaintively, “who is to educate that child. We were three of us, and we managed as well as could be expected. But now that there are five, the matter must be reconsidered. Who is to have the charge of the heir of Creux?”
“I am,” said Mrs Bayre, lifting her chubby boy and pressing his round cheek against hers.
“And I,” murmured Southerley, in a deep-voiced growl, “shall have the charge of you.”
“It’s a great pity,” said Repton, whose devotion to the child was as strong as it was new; “I’d have made an artist of him!”
“But the question is, you know,” said Bayre, “what he would have made of you.”
And then they all laughed; it took very little to set them laughing on that happy evening. And so the problem of the rule of three was solved in the easiest possible manner, and perhaps Jan Repton was not the least happy of the group.
“After all, there’s one’s art!” he remarked to the ladies, as he showed them, with pride, one of his paintings. It was on a most beautiful easel, one they could admire with a free conscience. But the picture itself was one of the worst you ever saw!
THE END
Florence Warden was the pseudonym of Florence Alice (Price) James.
The Wycil & Co. edition (New York, 1903) was consulted for the changes listed below.
Minor spelling inconsistencies (e.g.fisher-cap/fisher cap, seabirds/sea-birds, etc.) have been preserved.
Alterations to the text:
Punctuation: quotation mark pairings and missing periods and commas.
[Chapter XII]
Change “Barlettreddened, but said nothing” toBartlett.
[Chapter XIII]
“Well, well, you maycongratulaleyourself anyhow,” tocongratulate.
[End of text]