CHAPTER XXVI.

THE RULE OF THREE BECOMES THE RULE OF ONE

It was 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 the _château_ and 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 to _print_ it?”

“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 for _Paradise 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, _I_ must 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

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

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 “_Barlett_ reddened, but said nothing” to _Bartlett_.

[Chapter XIII]

“Well, well, you may _congratulale_ yourself anyhow,” to _congratulate_.

[End of text]