CHAPTER XXIII.

A PHOTOGRAPH

Bayre followed Miss Merriman into the house, and into the little ground-floor sitting-room, where she turned up the gas and showed the folding doors open into the adjoining room, where a maid sat reading a novelette by the light of a candle beside the baby’s cot.

“Wait here a moment, I always go and kiss my baby the moment I come in; nothing can interfere with that ceremony,” she said, with a pretty defiance which Bayre liked.

And as she disappeared through the folding-doors, which she shut after her, her attitude seemed to say that now she had once owned that that baby was hers she would brandish him in the eyes of the world and snap her fingers at destiny.

Bayre heard the soft whisperings of the two women, the mysterious cooings and cawings they made over the sleeping child. And when Miss Merriman swept majestically back into the room again, dressed in a plain grey tea-gown, with one of her roses pinned in it, he remembered his old ideal of the simple, domestic-minded woman, and he sympathised with Southerley’s adoration of this beautiful creature.

“Now,” she said defiantly, “perhaps you’ll explain why you have followed me, why you have come.”

Bayre was rather amused, and rather resentful.

“You must remember,” said he, “that whatever suspicions I may have had concerning your relationship to the child, all that I absolutely knew was that he was my uncle’s son, and that therefore it was a personal duty of mine to know what became of him. My friends too, Repton and Southerley--” She interrupted him with a quick gesture.

“Surely,” she said, panting a little, “you can’t pretend they have a right to know anything whatever about me!”

She was standing on one side of the table and Bayre was on the other. He leaned upon it to look earnestly into her face.

“Indeed I do,” he retorted. “I say that Southerley at least has a right to know that you are a married woman, and I say that it is not fair to him to conceal the fact.”

“How--not fair?” said the lady, sinking into a chair and speaking in quite a timid and subdued voice. “How could I know that--that it mattered to him?”

“I think,” said Bayre, still leaning on the table, though she made a gesture to invite him to be seated, “that women know those things sooner than the men themselves. It seems to me that you must have seen what his feelings were, and his hopes; and though I know women do these cruel things and think little of them, yet I’m sorry that you, a member of my family and the mother of that child, should be so heartless.”

“Heartless! I’m not that,” replied Miss Merriman.

And as she looked up with the tears raining down her face, Bayre felt compunction at his own severity.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I suppose I have no right to speak like this. But surely you might have trusted us. Don’t you think so?”

Miss Merriman was silent for a few moments, wiping her eyes quietly, and sobbing a little. Then she seemed suddenly to make up her mind to a great effort, and looking up, she pointed to a chair and said, peremptorily,--

“Sit down. You shall not scold me without hearing a word in my defence. I begin to think you’re as hard, as impossible, as your uncle himself.”

Bayre sat down. He was longing to hear something of the strange story she had to tell, and was quite ready to admit that all the fault of his uncle’s unhappy marriage had not been on the side of the wife.

“Now you’ve been to Creux--” she began. “You’ve been there twice, and you’ve seen your uncle, have you not?”

“Yes.”

“Well, do you think he is the sort of man to make a young wife happy?”

“Emphatically no,” admitted Bayre, promptly. “But surely you could see that before you married him?”

The poor lady clasped her hands and looked at him rather dismally.

“Do you know,” she asked earnestly, “the sort of life a girl leads among poor and proud relations who don’t always take the trouble to hide that she’s a burden upon them, even though they won’t consent to her trying to earn her own living? Well, if you can imagine that, you know the position I was in when I met your uncle and when he asked me to be his wife. There wasn’t even a question of my refusing: it was taken for granted by everybody that it was a splendid thing for me, and when I ventured to suggest that, being thirty or forty years older than I, he was rather old for me, I was looked upon as a monster of ingratitude for finding any fault. So we were married, and until we got to Creux it was bearable enough. I was a new toy, and he was kind to me. I was grateful too, really,” she insisted with pathetic earnestness.

“Of course, of course, I’m quite sure you were,” said Bayre, gently.

The lady went on,--

“But when we once got back to Creux life became almost intolerable at once, and all from the same cause--his cousin, Miss Ford.”

“Of course she wouldn’t approve of his marriage,” said Bayre.

“But she had no right to be jealous, vindictive, cruel,” urged Miss Merriman. “After all, her cousin had a right to marry, and she was provided for, for she had a little money of her own. But she was a perfect monster of avarice, and when my baby was born and she knew that he would have her cousin’s property she became so outrageously rude and harsh to me that I could not and would not bear it.”

“Did my uncle allow it?” asked Bayre, wondering whether the strange degeneration in his uncle had begun some time back.

“He didn’t see all of it,” said she. “Miss Ford was very artful, and she assumed to me when we were by ourselves an overbearing tone which she never used in your uncle’s presence. When I told him about this, and protested, he professed that I was exaggerating, making mountains out of mole-hills. And as my influence over him, such as it was, dwindled away directly we got back into the neighbourhood of this old cousin, you may imagine how all these scenes ended. He gradually took her part more and more, and blamed me for the uncomfortable life we all led. You see this Miss Ford had been his housekeeper for many years, and she was a very clever woman. Did you never see her?”

“Never. She died, you know, last year, before I ever went to Creux.”

“Ah, yes, yes!”

“Now that was just after you ran away, wasn’t it? When she was dead why didn’t you go back to your husband and child?” asked Bayre, gently.

“I wanted to, oh, I wanted to,” cried poor “Miss Merriman,” down whose cheeks the tears were again falling. “I should never have run away but for her.”

“How did it happen?” asked Bayre. “Will you tell me? I don’t ask out of curiosity, of course, but in the hope that I may be able to do something. Perhaps I could patch up this quarrel--not by myself, for my uncle can’t bear the sight of me, but through Miss Eden.”

“Ah! Miss Eden! What is she like?”

“You’ve never seen her?”

“Never.”

“But you’ve been in correspondence with her,” said Bayre. “I think I can guess that it was by arrangement with her that ‘Miss Merriman’ happened to be at hand when three poor travellers returned to town in charge of some particularly lively luggage!”

She looked down.

“I wonder you didn’t guess before,” she said drily. “Women are not so ready to undertake the care of other people’s children as I was to undertake the care of my own!”

“Yet you left Creux without him,” said Bayre.

“Not by my own wish,” said she, looking up with flashing eyes. “I was tricked by Marie Vazon. When life grew too intolerable for me at the _château_, and I made up my mind to run away with my baby, I was obliged to take Marie into my confidence. She pretended to sympathise with me, crossed over with me and the baby to St Luke’s to catch the boat for Southampton, and then when I was on board preparing a cosy place for him in the cabin downstairs, she stole off the boat with my little one and left me to go away without him.”

The remembrance of the trick which had broken her heart when it was played upon her brought fresh tears into the mother’s eyes.

“They were artful customers, those Vazons,” said Bayre; “when you found you had been deceived, had you no thought of trying to get back?”

She nodded emphatically.

“He wouldn’t take me back. It was his cousin’s fault, of course. I wrote and I wrote, and I begged and I begged, but it was of no use. And when I knew his cousin was dead I wrote again to him and also to Miss Eden. From him I got no answer. From Miss Eden I got a sweet, womanly letter telling me she’d tried her best for me but that he simply wouldn’t hear her.”

Remembering his uncle’s wooden countenance, and the blank look with which he listened to anything he didn’t want to hear, Bayre could quite understand this.

He rose to go with a grave face.

“It’s an unhappy business,” said he. “I wish I could do anything. If I can, will you let me know?”

She rose too, with a strange look of unsatisfied longing in her great eyes.

“You are very good, very kind,” said she. And then she paused. “I like to think of your kindness, and of that of those two others. You must forgive me for running away; there were some things I couldn’t bear.”

Bayre felt the blood rising to his face.

“You mean--Southerley?” he said in a very low voice.

She made an impatient gesture.

“Oh, no, no, no, I don’t mean anything,” she said restlessly. “What should Mr Southerley matter to me, a married woman? You say strange things, Mr Bayre.”

He smiled at her pretty petulance.

“Well,” said he, “of course it would be too desperately wicked of you, Mrs Bayre, to see anything attractive enough to endanger your peace of mind in any man but Mr Bayre--”

He paused upon the name, and she suddenly looked up at him with an unaccustomed light of humour in her eyes. And when their eyes met they both laughed outright.

“After all,” said she, desperately, “why should I deny it to you? Why should I not acknowledge that I _did_ find something in this handsome young friend of yours which made me feel that it would be wiser not to see him again? I’m very human, I’m afraid. And--my life has not been a very happy one. Where’s the harm of owning that I’m only a woman, especially when I’m trying, trying hard, hard to be an honourable and good one--for my child’s sake!”

Bayre could not answer, but he nodded ferociously two or three times in sympathetic assent.

“Now,” said she, “you must go. Already my landlady, who knows me as the pink of discretion, will be wondering who you are.”

“That’s all right,” said Bayre, smiling. “Tell her the truth. Tell her I’m your nephew.”

At that her youth got the better of her and she burst out laughing.

“The truth will not always bear to be told,” said she. “In this case I’m sure I shall not venture it.”

Before he reached the door she rushed to the mantelpiece and took from it a large unframed photograph of herself in the dress she had worn on the concert platform that evening.

“Take this souvenir of your aunt,” said she, demurely, “and write on it that it’s a present to her dutiful nephew. Good-bye.”

He wondered why she had given him the picture, and it was not until he had got half-way home that it occurred to him to think that perhaps she liked the thought that her picture, in all her brilliant beauty, should lie about the house where Southerley was.

He did not quite know whether this idea of his did the lady injustice; but he decided that, innocent as this little bit of coquetry might be, he would not risk fanning a hopeless flame in his friend’s breast.

There was a sort of suspicion, however, in the faces of both Repton and Southerley when he got home and found them playing cribbage by the fire. They wanted to know where he had been, and said rude things when he wouldn’t tell them. And then, as luck would have it, Southerley pounced into his bedroom when he had retired for the night, and found Signora Beata’s portrait stuck in his looking-glass, in front of which he was taking off his collar.

Southerley made for the portrait in a rage.

“Who’s this?” roared he, as he seized the photograph, which Bayre in vain tried to intercept.

The owner of the picture took the bull by the horns.

“It’s my aunt,” shouted he, as he made a clutch at it.

“Aunt be blowed! It’s not. It’s--it’s--”

“It’s the wife of my uncle and namesake, old Bartlett Bayre of Creux, and the mother of the child we brought over from St Luke’s a few weeks ago,” said Bayre, deliberately.

The two young men looked each other straight in the face for a few moments.

Then Southerley tumbled into a chair, looking very queer about the eyes.

“Good lord! Do you mean it?”

“Rather.”