CHAPTER IV.

AND SOMEBODY’S AVERSION

There were “ructions” when Southerley got back to the pier, having failed to catch up the boat containing the old man, and having failed also to get a sight of the boat in which the pretty girl had set sail in her turn.

Southerley was inclined to think the conduct of his two friends unneighbourly in the extreme. He felt that it was their business to have detained the lady until his return, though he could not explain how they should have set about it. He felt that he had been shamefully tricked, and he did not get over his mortification and resentment until chance threw in their way, on the following morning, a person able and willing to communicate to them those details concerning old Mr Bayre of Creux which Aurélie had been prevented from imparting to them.

It was a tradesman’s wife in the town, from whom they had bought some small nick-nacks as souvenirs of their holiday, who told them the strange story. Mr Bayre, she said, had lived for many years a bachelor on his little island, with only his starched and penurious old housekeeper, his cousin, Mees Ford, as companion. The _château_ Madame described as a magnificent and even famous mansion, more like a museum than an ordinary house, by reason of the splendid collection of pictures, tapestries, statues and curiosities of all kinds, of which old Mr Bayre was a well-known collector.

Even this was new to Bartlett Bayre the younger, whose knowledge of his uncle’s habits was of the slightest, and whose acquaintance with him had ceased very many years before.

The good woman went on to tell how, on one of the expeditions which old Mr Bayre periodically made in search of more treasures, he had found an unexpected one in the shape of a beautiful young wife, whom he had brought back to Creux and shut up in the dreary _château_ and the still drearier society of himself and Mees Ford.

“Poor thing!” cried Madame, raising her eyes and her hands with a shrug of sympathy, “no wonder that she was dull! This beautiful young creature buried like that in what was little better than a magnificent tomb!”

“And how long ago was this?” asked Bayre.

“A little more than two years, monsieur, since he brought her to Creux, and it is six months since she ran away.”

“Ran away!”

All the young men echoed the words in different keys. It was satisfactory, at any rate, to know that the unknown beauty who had excited so much attention among them was not the ogre’s wife.

“Then who is the young girl--”

The good woman put up her hand and bowed her head, as an intimation that she wished to proceed with her tale her own way. And she again addressed Bayre,--

“She ran away, as well she might; and the only pity is that she was not allowed to take her baby with her!”

“Baby!”

“Yes, messieurs, a charming baby. She ran away with him, and reached the port here with him safely. But Marie Vazon, who had charge of the child, played her false at the last, and left the poor young mother to go alone to England without him. Oh, those Vazons! They are the spies of old M. Bayre; father and daughter they have command of everything for him. And they do say that old M. Bayre and Mees Ford knew what young Madame was going to do, and that, like the selfish old people they were, they rejoiced to get rid of her. As for the baby, it is left to Marie Vazon at the farm. A pretty nurse, _ma foi_!”

And Madame raised her eyebrows with a significant look.

Again Southerley’s voice broke in. All this information about wives and babies might be very exciting for Bayre, whose chances of being his uncle’s heir were thus destroyed, but compared with the great subject, that of the glorious girl in the fisher cap, it was positively tedious.

“But who is the handsome girl with the long brown hair--” he began again persistently.

Madame turned to him with a smile.

“Ah! She will not be buried in the tomb-like _château_ any longer,” she said archly. “Mees Eden is a ward of old M. Bayre’s, and she is going to be married to a gentleman of the island--of this island, I mean.”

Southerley gave a groan. But Repton drew himself up.

“Tell me his name that I may go and shoot him,” he said valiantly. “The islands are all very well, but if you’ll forgive my saying so, Madame, the lady is too handsome for so confined a sphere: we have already decided that she must come to England--in fact, that she must marry one of _us_.”

Madame burst out laughing.

“Ah, you are not the only young gentleman to feel like that about Mees Eden,” she said. “But M. Bayre he has French ideas about his ward, and he chooses to marry her to a staid, middle-aged man like himself rather than to a hot-headed young fellow about whom he could not feel so sure.”

“But that bright-eyed girl would never let herself be handed over like a parcel of currants to a man she didn’t care about--a middle-aged man too!” cried Repton.

“Ah! I cannot say, but I think it is so,” said Madame. “Although Mees Eden is the daughter of an Englishman, a very old friend of M. Bayre’s, her mother was a French lady, and she has been brought up at a school in France. I think she will do as French girls do: they have spirit, but they are obedient; and why should she not do as her mother did before her?”

“She must be so dull at Creux,” said Southerley, thoughtfully, “that I suppose she would do anything for a change.”

“How long has she been here?” asked Bayre, breaking in rather suddenly and rather imperiously upon the lighter tones of the rest.

“Only a few months. It was after his wife had run away that M. Bayre sent for her from her school. And then, while she could not get to Creux by reason of the gales and the stormy weather, his old cousin died. It was a dreadful business, for the weather was too rough for her body to be brought over for burial here, and--”

“I know,” interrupted Repton. “They told us. It was washed away.”

Madame nodded.

“Yes. It was a dreadful business. Old M. Bayre has never been quite the same man since. You see the one shock came close upon the other. Even if he did not care much for his wife, we must suppose her running away to have had some effect upon him. And though he and Mees Ford used to quarrel, still he had been used to her for long years, and doubtless he felt her death deeply. Now he shuts himself up more than ever, and he never goes away to London or to Paris as he used to do. And when strangers come to see his collection they never see him.”

“Oh, we can see his collection, then?” said Repton, with interest.

“Oh, yes. It is his great pride to let strangers see it. Formerly he or his housekeeper would show them through the rooms, but now it is a servant who leads visitors through them.”

The young men looked at each other.

“We’ll go over to-morrow,” said Southerley.

Bayre assented, but with a grave and pre-occupied air. The whole tale was a weird one, and concerning his own family as it did, it gave him food for reflection.

When, therefore, on the following day, they engaged a couple of boatmen to take them over to Creux--for Southerley did not offer to repeat his experience of navigating the channel himself--Bayre remained moody and thoughtful in the bows while his companions were chatty and cheerful in the stern.

It was one of those bright and sunny days of which January generally gives us a few as a set-off against the asperities of the February and March which must inevitably follow; the first view of the steep and rocky coast of Creux, with its fringe of jagged rocks, picturesque to see but dangerous to negotiate, was striking and impressive. The cliffs, of black and white granite, rose sheer out of the water, broken and eaten away in many places into deep ravines, where a softening growth of brown ferns made beautiful the entrance to shadowy caverns in the rock.

Outside the cliffs many a jagged pinnacle of the granite shot up its points from a little base of foam into the air, with seabirds circling round its summit and a soft plash-plash beating against its sides.

Nothing could be seen at first approach beyond the rocks and the steep cliff; but presently the travellers, struck dumb with appreciation of the picturesque, found themselves approaching a poor sort of little pier, close by which a small house, with a man in fisherman’s jersey lolling in front of it, gave the first sign of human presence on the island.

With some difficulty the boat was made fast and the three young men scrambled ashore. A climb of a few minutes brought them to the top of the cliff, and thence it was but a short quarter of a mile to the famous _château_, which, half hidden by almost the only clump of trees on the island, proved to be a long and very unimposing stone dwelling, large, straggling, and evidently built with an eye rather to use than to beauty.

On their way the travellers passed a small farmhouse, where a man of age difficult to fix, with greyish hair and clad in a blouse, saluted them and watched them with furtive eyes as they made their way towards the house. He was a very unprepossessing person, with small eyes set close together, and with the wrinkles of cunning and of avarice on his weatherbeaten face.

The unimposing entrance to the _château_ was by a small courtyard, on the other side of which was a pleasant garden in which, in the summer, fruit and flowers, vegetables and sweet herbs, grew side by side.

A ring at the bell, the clang of which they heard echoing through the old house, brought to the door a woman of the peasant type, quite young, probably, and not ill-looking of feature, but with sly blue eyes and thick lips, and a furtive expression. She was dressed rather in the simple farmhouse costume than in that of the usual servants of a country house, and wore the round, close cap which is so generally becoming.

On making known their wish to see the treasures of M. Bayre’s collection, they were at once admitted by her into a plain-looking hall, where they inscribed their names in a large book which lay, with pens and ink, upon a table at one end.

While they were doing this they heard certain sounds in a little gallery above them, which informed them that they were observed from that quarter; and suddenly the girl looked up, and, as if obeying a signal, begged the gentlemen to excuse her one moment, ran up the staircase and for a moment disappeared.

When she came hurriedly down again, after an absence of a few seconds only, she was red and shy. Stammering out her excuses, she said that only two persons could be shown through the mansion at one time, and singling out Repton and Southerley, she opened a door on her left hand and showed them in, while she beckoned to the mortified Bayre to follow her to the door by which he had entered.

“Oh, come, I say! We don’t want to go in unless we can all go,” cried Repton, in astonishment.

But Bayre, who understood that his uncle meant to forbid him, and him alone, the house, waved his hand in token that they were to go without him, and hurried, without a word, out of the house.

He was in a tumult of irritated feeling. As he threw one glance up at the windows of the mansion which was so undeservedly closed to him, he caught sight of the face of Miss Eden, pale and constrained, looking out. Most unreasonably he at once decided that this girl had somehow had a hand in his discomfiture, and it was with a feeling of fierce dislike--or at least he thought it was--and of defiance that he raised his hat to her and at once dashed into the avenue and disappeared from her sight.

He could not understand the effect the sight of this girl had upon him. If he had felt irritated before at his uncle’s refusal to allow him to enter his house, that feeling was as nothing to the burning indignation he experienced at the thought that this bit of a girl, this restless, hysterical, fidgety girl, as he had, in his utter ignorance, called her, should have been a witness of the gross outrage which had just been put upon him.

It was in vain he told himself that he did not care what she saw or what she thought, that she was a capricious, malicious creature who had herself urged his uncle not to have anything to do with him.

He could not forget her face; he could not get over his annoyance. As he walked out from under the avenue trees into the winter sunshine he felt as if unseen eyes were upon him, as if undiscoverable throats were muttering hoarse laughter from the shelter of the brambles and the dead ferns that he passed.

But these fancies presently grew into the knowledge that he was indeed being watched, not by an unseen elfish being, but by the morose-looking man in blouse and peaked cap whom they had passed at the farmhouse. And, discovering suddenly a likeness between this individual and the girl who had opened the door of the mansion, Bayre had no difficulty in deciding that they were father and daughter, and guessed that these were the two people of whom he had heard--the rulers of the island under his uncle, the spies, Vazon and his daughter Marie.

Bayre had an uncomfortable feeling that this man knew of the slight which had been put upon him, and that he had been told off to watch him until he should have left the island. Full of fury as this suspicion crossed his mind, the young man resolved not to linger about for his friends but to return at once to the boat and to wait for them there.

He was, however, drawn aside by the beauty of a singular natural curiosity which came in his way when he drew near the coast, one of those strange, funnel-like openings down through the cliffs to the sea which are such a feature of these islands. Peering down the wide opening through the green growth and dead bracken which formed a graceful fringe around the opening, Bayre was fascinated by the long dark vista, and by the sight and the sound of the incoming tide dashing little waves of feathery foam against the funnel’s sides.

As he looked, holding his pipe in one hand and his pouch in the other, more with a wish to seem to be light-hearted than because he felt a longing to smoke, he was startled by a girl’s voice behind him.

It was a soft voice, a sweet voice; there was no getting away from that fact. Nevertheless it was the voice of the “hysterical, restless, fidgety” girl.

“Oh, Mr Bayre, I’m so very, _very_ sorry!”

And turning round so quickly that he narrowly missed precipitating himself through the funnel into the water below, Bayre saw Miss Eden, her fisher cap on her head, her jacket, hastily put on, open, and her eyes brighter, more beautiful than ever.

He tried to feel that he loathed her, but it was a hard task.