CHAPTER X.
OR A CRIME?
Bayre did 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 the _château_ besides 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?