CHAPTER XX.

AND AGAIN GOOD-BYE

Bayre saw that nothing was to be got out of the sullen peasant woman, so he led her out of the room, and into the hall, where Olwen, who had heard the noise of loud voices, was standing at the foot of the staircase.

Marie Vazon looked at her with an insolent frown.

“What was that noise?” asked Olwen. “And what was it that dropped or was thrown out of the window?”

Marie laughed harshly.

“Nothing of yours,” she replied insolently. “And nothing that you need concern yourselves about, either of you. Better hold your tongues about us, as well as about your uncle, if you want to keep the family respected. And you, monsieur, you can let me go. You will get nothing out of me, I can tell you.”

Bayre quite agreed with her on this point, and he drew the bolts of the door and let her out. He wanted to follow her, and to find out what she and her father were going to do with the booty they had obtained from the mansion; especially was he anxious to know what had become of the iron box which Marie had thrown out of the window to her father. But Olwen was suffering so severely from nervous shock, consequent upon the events of the day and the disturbance of the night, that she begged him not to leave the house until morning, alleging the terror she felt at the thought of being alone in the house with her disabled guardian and with two women-servants, both of whom were in a state of panic themselves.

Although he feared that this delay would enable the Vazons to get away with some valuable stolen property, the young man was unable to turn a deaf ear to the girl’s pleading; and he therefore spent the rest of the night in an uneasy patrol of the mansion, after shutting down the window through which Marie had communicated with her father, and cast out, as he could not but doubt, some of her master’s property.

With the first rays of morning, however, he had decided to go to the cottage of the Vazons in the hope that he might yet be in time to intercept their flight. But an unexpected obstacle was placed in his way. Olwen met him as he was drawing the bolt of the door, and told him that his uncle wished to see him.

She led him upstairs to the door of the old man’s room, where Bayre was rather surprised to find the invalid dressed and sitting in an easy chair by the embers of the fire. The curtains were still drawn, and the great room, which looked so cosy by candle-light, seemed cheerless as the grey morning light fell upon the ashes in the grate and upon the bent head of the old man in the chair.

“What is this Olwen tells me about a robbery in the night by the Vazons?” asked he. “She says they threw out an iron box. What iron box was it?”

It was evident that the old man was more uneasy than he wished to appear. Bayre had not much to tell.

“The girl didn’t seem to know what was in it herself,” said he. “I heard her say that it probably contained something of value. That was all. I could not hear whether the father made any reply.”

He saw his uncle’s foot tapping the floor with a rapid, nervous movement. But the old man only said,--

“I know of no iron box; they have got hold of some lumber, I suppose, which, in their cupidity, they imagine to be valuable. But they will find themselves sold. My collection lies all in open cases, with the exception of a few things which I keep in a safe in the next room. These people have no discrimination. Olwen has been through the galleries this morning, and the two saloons, and she says she finds nothing missing.”

“The girl Marie must have known that I was in the house, too near the rooms where you keep your collection for a wholesale plundering to have taken place there in safety.”

The old man grunted ungraciously. Evidently he was loth to admit that he owed any further obligation to the nephew he disliked so much.

“The jade got at some very good things in the other rooms, though,” snapped he. “There’s a valuable clock missing from one of the bedrooms, and some old silver.”

“Well, if you’ll let me go down to their place, as I was on the point of doing,” said his nephew, making for the door as he spoke, “I may be in time to prevent their leaving the island till they’ve disgorged.”

But the old man thrust out one hand imperiously.

“No, not you,” cried he, sharply. “You stay here. Olwen, send one of the servants for Jean, and tell _him_ to go down to the cottage. They may take the silver and the clock, but I should like to see this iron box that so much fuss has been made about. Tell him to bring that back and let the rest go.”

Both his nephew and Olwen were surprised by these directions, which the girl proceeded dutifully to carry out, leaving the room for that purpose. Young Bayre, not quite knowing what to do, remained waiting for his uncle to speak, and finding himself apparently forgotten by the old gentleman, sat down near the window to wait for fresh developments. He was as much interested as his uncle in this matter of the Vazons’ escape, which, since they were certainly in some sort accomplices of the old man, might lead at last to a solution of the mystery that certainly surrounded him.

It seemed a long time that he sat there, moving from time to time, just sufficiently, as he thought, to remind his uncle that he was still in the room. But never a word did the old man speak, and the only sign of life he gave was the movement he made from time to time to stroke the head of the dog which rested at his feet.

In the circumstances it seemed a very, very long time before Olwen’s voice was heard outside, and opening the door, she admitted not only herself but a sturdy-looking man in a blouse, whom young Bayre had seen at work in the grounds.

This person, it appeared, was Jean. Old Mr Bayre raised his head with sudden and vivid interest.

“Well?” he asked sharply.

Jean replied in French, in gruff tones.

“They’re gone, m’sieu,” he said. “The Vazons have left Creux.”

The old man sank back in his chair and there was dead silence for a few moments. Jean looked at Olwen, then at young Bayre, and shrugged his shoulders.

“_Ma foi!_” he said shortly, “they were a good riddance. Old Vazon did little work, but he did plenty of grumbling. And as for Marie--” And he shrugged his shoulders again with a gesture signifying that he did not think much of her in any capacity.

And then, as nobody made any remark to him, Jean pulled his forelock to the company and shuffled out of the room and down the stairs.

Olwen became alarmed at the strange depression into which old Mr Bayre appeared to have sunk, and going softly to his side, she leant over him and asked him how he was.

Opening his eyes, the old man caught sight of his nephew and instantly pointed with a shaking finger to the door.

“Go away,” he said in a hoarse voice. “Go at once. And let me never see your face again.”

Weak as he was, he woke for the moment into such a passion of determination and resentment, as he uttered these words, that Olwen feared for the result if the object of his vehement prejudice should remain any longer under his roof. She therefore ran across the room to young Bayre, who had already opened the door to go out, and following him to the head of the stairs, held out her hand and said hurriedly,--

“Yes, yes, you had better go away at once. I’m not afraid of being left with him now that the Vazons are away. And I’ll write to you; I’ll be sure to write.”

Already the old man’s voice, harsh and broken, was calling to her to return to him. She looked up once, her great eyes full of light, kind, reluctant to let her good friend go.

An answering light came into the young man’s eyes. He retained her hand, drawing her towards him.

“Olwen, kiss me,” he whispered.

For one moment she held back, but she yielded, and their lips met for the first time.

Then, as the old man’s voice was heard again, she drew herself away and stole into the room, and the young man, staggering and feeling for the banisters, went slowly downstairs.

A minute later he was outside the house, walking at a rapid pace towards the Vazons’ cottage. Jean, who was in the grounds near the mansion, had caught sight of him, and came up with him, panting, before he reached his destination.

“They were a bad lot, the pair of them,” cried Jean, who was evidently highly delighted by the disappearance of father and daughter; “only for some reason or other there was no saying a word against them to old M. Bayre. Why, we could all have told him how Nini Portelet came over here one day when Marie had left monsieur’s child alone in the cottage, and how she took it over to St Luke’s with her. It was when you and your friends were over here, monsieur, that it happened. And Marie didn’t put herself out about it, but just borrowed the child of a St Luke’s fisherman, and got her money from old Monsieur Bayre as usual. Ah, they were a pair of beauties! She gave the child back to its mother yesterday, and I guessed somehow that they might be missing to-day. As a matter of fact, I know they crossed over to St Luke’s before it was light.”

Bayre entered the deserted cottage, where the disordered state of the living-room spoke of a sudden departure. Among the displaced articles of furniture, not good enough to be worth any attempt to take away, there were certain signs, cynically left without disguise, of the robbery committed at the _château_ on the previous night.

There was a tablecloth, heavily and handsomely fringed, in which, without doubt, some of the booty had been hastily wrapped up by Marie. There were a few plated articles which had been inadvertently carried away with the silver. And there was the iron box about which so much fuss had been made.

Yes, lying bent and broken among the ashes on the hearth, after having evidently been forced open with a bent poker which lay near, was the very box which Marie had dropped out of the window to her father; and lying on the uneven tiles of the floor, at a little distance from it, was a heap of papers which Bayre at once judged to have been its contents.

He picked these up and began to examine them. To his astonishment and perplexity, the very first of these to attract his attention was one in which the words “my nephew and namesake Bartlett Bayre,” were the first to catch his eye.

Further inspection proved this to be a will made and signed by his uncle only nine months previously, and in it he found that he himself was not only left a legacy of ten thousand pounds, but was appointed guardian of the testator’s infant son and heir.

Bayre started to his feet, so much amazed at what he had read that for the moment he seemed scarcely able to think or even to see.

His uncle, only nine short months ago, had been so kindly disposed towards him that he had made him a handsome legacy! How then had it happened, unless indeed the old man’s mind had become unhinged, that he had shown his nephew, from the first sight of him, nothing but aversion of the strongest kind?

The thing was so strange that Bayre could not trust himself to consider it thoroughly at that time. Hastily gathering up all the rest of the papers which he could find, he decided, after a moment’s hesitation, not to take them back to the _château_, but to carry them with him to London, and to communicate with Olwen from there, telling her of his find, and asking her advice as to whether he should send them to her or to his uncle’s solicitors.

They would, he thought, be better judges of his uncle’s real state of mind than he could be; and in any case the will could not be of much value, as his uncle had undoubtedly altered his dispositions long since.

So utterly absorbed was he in the strange events which had happened, and in this last, perhaps the strangest discovery of all, that the journey to London seemed only half the length of the journey away from it.

He had sent no word as to the day he was returning, so that when he entered the sitting-room at the Diggings at ten o’clock at night he found Southerley and Repton smoking together by the fire, in a state of gloom and abstraction, and with the supper-table laid for only two.

“Hallo!” said Repton, sulkily. “You, is it?”

But Southerley only scowled and said nothing.

“Yes, it’s me,” replied Bayre, with ungrammatical cheeriness. “How are you, eh? Have you got any bottled stout? And how’s the--”

But Repton sprang up with a yell and a tragic uplifting of the arm.

“Don’t dare to pronounce that evil brat’s name here,” cried he, sepulchrally. “Unless you want to be chucked out of window.”

“But why not?” persisted Bayre, who felt a redoubled interest in the child whose guardian it had certainly once been his uncle’s intention that he should be.

Repton pointed to Southerley with a tragic forefinger.

“Ask _him_!” said he in a hollow voice.

Southerley growled a little, and then moved sulkily in his chair.

“Oh, the child’s right enough, as children go, I suppose,” said he. “The trouble of it is that Miss Merriman has grown so much attached to the wretched little animal that there’s no talking to her, no getting her attention, no interesting her in anything but its miserable little mewlings and pukings.”

“That’s the worst of the domestic women you’re so fond of, Bayre,” went on Repton; “when there’s a child about they won’t pay the least attention to anything or anybody else. Whenever we go, as, of course, being two out of its three fathers, we’re bound to go, to inspect the child, and see that it’s properly fed and clothed and educated--” Bayre interrupted with a mocking laugh, but Repton went steadily and stodgily on: “Whenever we seek to do our duty, as I say, Miss Merriman makes fun of us, and says, ‘Did its nice ickle papas tum to see if its bockle was too warm-warm?’ And such stuff as that. Now you’re come back I hope you’ll try to bring this young woman to reason, and--”

“I hope you won’t try to do anything of the sort,” growled Southerley in a saturnine manner from his chair. “That would be just the last straw, for you to interfere. For we know you like domestic women, and so no doubt you’d worm yourself into her confidence, and--”

“And we should be nowhere!” added Repton. “That’s true.”

“Certainly we’re nowhere already,” went on Southerley, meditatively. “I’m only hoping you’ll be nowhere too!”

“You needn’t trouble your heads about me,” said Bayre, airily. “I’ve not the least wish to enter the lists, I assure you.”

The words were scarcely out of his mouth when there was a soft knock at the door, and to the rage and consternation of two out of the three young men, beautiful Miss Merriman, who had not been once to the Diggings since Bayre went away, peeped into the room and smiled a gracious “How do you do?” to that fortunate young man.

“Oh, Mr Bayre,” cried she, sweetly, “could you come downstairs a moment? I have something to ask you about the little boy, and whether you’ve heard anything of his parents.”

Bayre having, of course, expressed his ready assent, she retreated with a smile evenly distributed among them all, and left the three young men together. Repton made as if to stab the too lucky Bayre with the bread-knife.

“Villain,” he said, “you deserve to die. But first you shall interview the lady, and we’ll listen outside to see that you don’t take a mean advantage of your visit to the baby’s native haunts.”

Southerley, who was more uneasy than Repton, looked up sullenly.

“Oh, let him go,” said he, in a sort of despair. “May as well be put out of one’s misery at once. Go and ask her to marry you, and, for goodness’ sake, get it quickly over.”

From which Bayre, as he went downstairs, with a brand-new suspicion concerning Miss Merriman in his mind, opined that poor Southerley was as false to his ideal of a woman of genius as the only possible lady-love as he, Bayre, was false to his.