CHAPTER V.
WAS IT AVERSION?
Bayre tried to look as if he did not understand what it was that the pretty girl was sorry for. But Miss Eden made short work of his pretended ignorance by saying gently,--
“I have an idea about your uncle; it is an idea formed upon his treatment of me and it seems to be consistent with his treatment of you. Although he sent for me himself from the school where I was, and wrote me a nice letter implying that he and his cousin were lonely and that they would be glad to have me, yet now I’m here he seems to avoid me as much as he can. And now, you see, when he knows that his nephew is here--for that he recognised you as his nephew I am pretty sure from something he said--why, he avoids you too.”
Bayre made an attempt at a haughty smile.
“Oh, if he thinks I mind that he won’t let me see over his collection he’s mistaken. And if he thinks I feel a greater interest in it than any outsider would do he is mistaken again. I’ve never wished to obtrude upon my uncle’s seclusion; I never have obtruded upon it. And if my curiosity as a visiting tourist is at all disappointed, I am more than compensated by the satisfaction I feel that I have always been independent of relations who seem to be devoid of the ordinary instincts of humanity.”
Over Miss Eden’s pretty face there came a slightly puzzled look.
“I don’t say it’s unnatural in the circumstances, but I think you’re too hard,” she said. “I’ll tell you what I’ve always said to myself about Mr Bayre, when he has been more than usually brusque in his manner to me. It is this: Is it fair to judge a man directly after he has experienced two great shocks? I dare say you know all about them, what happened in the case of his wife, and then in that of his cousin. Just think of it,” went on the girl, warmly, her face lighting up with generous emotion, her voice deep, and low, and thrilling; “to lose them both, one after the other, within a few weeks!”
“Was he quite without blame?” asked Bayre, quickly. “To judge by what I have seen of him it’s not likely.”
“What have you seen?” retorted Miss Eden. “Nothing. Less than nothing. He hasn’t even spoken to you!”
Bayre laughed rather grimly.
“Exactly. A gentleman who shows such marked amiability to a kinsman would be the sort of person to treat others in the same way.”
She shook her head slowly.
“From what I’ve heard,” she said with conviction, “he must have been very different before those two things happened. To begin with, he was very generous. If the poor in the islands wanted help he was always the first to give it. Now he is soured, changed, I admit; he seems stunned by his misfortunes, and he shuts himself up to brood upon them. But I believe that this mood will pass; give him another six months and I believe he will be his old self again. At least, I hope so. At present he is suffering from two blows to his affections, and he seems _afraid_, positively afraid to trust himself to love anybody else.”
“Well, I’m sure I don’t want him to love me,” said Bayre in an off-hand tone.
“No, it doesn’t matter to you, of course, because your life is spent away from him,” said the girl, rather ruefully. “But it does to others, to me, and to--to others besides me.”
And a still graver look passed over her face.
Bayre looked at her and softened in spite of himself.
“Of course it does,” said he, almost humbly. “It must make a very great difference to you. In fact, I can’t understand how you manage to exist in such utter loneliness as you describe.”
The girl gave a sort of sigh, which she immediately turned into a laugh.
“Well, I don’t suppose I shall have to endure it for long. In the meantime it’s such a pleasant change, after the strict school-hours I’ve been accustomed to, to get up when I like, to read as much as I like, to walk, row, sail, bathe just when I like, that I haven’t found life pall upon me one bit. Whether I should get tired of it if I had nothing else to look forward to I don’t know; I suppose I should grow restless and discontented. But at present I can’t say that I’m suffering tortures on account of the touch of Robinson Crusoeism that there is in my existence.”
Of course she was not. Bayre glanced at her and understood perfectly the feeling of freedom after restraint which this live, this brilliant creature, quivering with vitality, must enjoy in the easy, open-air life she described: even her reading, he thought to himself, would be done for the most part out of doors, with the fresh breeze from the sea blowing upon her young face, the salt spray helping to curl into graceful little tendrils the loose strands of brown hair which escaped from the confinement of the black ribbon at the nape of her neck.
“What do you read? Novels, I suppose?” he asked, after a moment’s pause.
And the moment he had uttered the words he felt that they were an impertinence. What right had he to question her upon her habits and tastes? She blushed a little, and he had begun to stammer a kind of apology when she waved away his words and said frankly,--
“Novels! Yes. I’m afraid it is chiefly novels. But I’ve read Carlyle’s _French Revolution_, and liked it too!” she added, with a certain rather comical pride.
“That was indeed most meritorious on your part,” said Bayre, with mock gravity, feeling the oddest conflict within him between his avowed tastes and the strong and strange attraction this girl had for him.
Strange, because it was more than the ordinary admiration which a young man feels for a beautiful girl. Now that he saw more of her he felt drawn by a sort of magnetic attraction in her sparkling eyes, something which made him inquisitive to read into the depths of that bright young soul, something that told him, much more plainly than did her words, that she was no ordinary pretty girl, but that she had a nature which could feel and a head which could think.
“Oh, I didn’t mean that!” she replied, laughing again. “But when a man talks of novels there is always a suggestion in his words that they are beneath _him_, at all events.”
“_I_ am not in a position to say that they’re beneath me,” said Bayre. “I want to write them. Indeed, if the truth were told--”
“You’ve written one already? Well, so have I!”
“Ah!”
There was a certain inevitable tone of indulgence in this exclamation which made the girl redden.
“Why do you say ‘Ah!’ like that?”
“Did I say it offensively?” said Bayre, smiling at last.
“I won’t go so far as to say that; but you said it in a tone which implied--well, I think it implied that you could not expect much from my performance.”
“If my tone said all that I apologise humbly. And yet, no, on second thoughts I don’t apologise. For after all, what could there be in a novel by a young girl just out of school, who knows nothing whatever of life beyond the four walls of her schoolroom?”
“But one can imagine, even if one doesn’t know.”
There was an indescribable spirit and impulse under these words which made the young man look at her curiously.
“Yes, yes, but imagination is not of much value unless it has something to go upon. It is of no more value than a painting done by a man who had never seen anything but his paint-box. You must study Nature, copy Nature, before your imagination is of any use to you!”
“Ah! Now you go too far,” cried she, warmly, “for it is of use, even if it only serves to make the world look more pleasant than it really is.”
“I don’t call that a use, I call it a danger,” said Bayre, now quite as warm as she in his argument. “Supposing, for instance, you start by endowing with all the gifts of your imagination some commonplace person whom, upon that and that alone, you resolve to marry, would your imagination be strong enough, do you think, to enable you to gild your bargain to the end?”
She blushed a rosy red and looked at him half angrily, half mischievously, with a quick glance.
“Is a man the worse for being commonplace?” she asked. “And is it likely that I, who, as you say, know nothing of the world and the people in it, should ever be able to start on a voyage of discovery in search of the man that isn’t commonplace?”
Bayre laughed. And he thought, rather guiltily, of his own avowed ideals, which were very much the same as hers. And at the same moment it flashed through his mind that these same ideals were unsatisfying in his case; it followed, therefore, that they must be proved to be so in her case also.
“Look here,” said he, “I’m not going to dispute that many high qualities, or let us say many serviceable qualities, may be found in those people whom it’s usual to call commonplace, people with no imagination, no ideas; but you, with your romantic tendencies--”
“How do you know I have romantic tendencies?”
Bayre answered, after a pause, that it was because she read novels and wanted to write them. But it occurred to him, even as he said this, that the real reason for his opinion was that he saw romance sparkling in her eyes, emanating from her, encircling her. She was a figure of romance in herself. Frank, sympathetic, impulsive, imaginative, brimming over with the joy of life, she was the very incarnation of healthy, joyous, budding womanhood, of the womanhood that looks out with eyes full of vague golden hope at the future, and that lives meanwhile in almost ecstatic joy in the present.
“Well,” said she, with a happy smile, “surely it’s rather a shrewd arrangement to use up one’s romantic tendencies by reading novels, and perhaps even by writing them, so that they mayn’t interfere with the prosaic course of one’s actual life.”
“Is actual life prosaic to you?” said Bayre. “A young girl shut up in a lonely and gloomy house with an old guardian who hardly ever speaks to her! I never heard of a less prosaic situation in my life.”
“Ah, well, the prose is to come,” said she, lightly. “Your uncle is very anxious to get me off his hands, and he is to introduce to me to-morrow a certain neighbour of his who, it seems, has been struck by my charms, and who proposes humbly to solicit the honour of my fair hand.”
The girl said this with the most delicious mixture of mischievous amusement and girlish shyness, blushing and looking away, while at the same time her eyes danced with fun and her lips were curved into a smile. Bayre was stupefied, indignant.
He had not the least reason to be, of course.
“And you mean to say that you’re going to let yourself be married off to a man you care no more for than that?” he asked quite sharply.
“I don’t know whether I care for him; I’ve never seen him yet.”
“Never--seen him!”
“At least, not to my knowledge. As he has seen me it’s possible I may recognise his face when he’s formally introduced to me. He lives at Guernsey, and I’m often over there.”
“And do you really think any happiness could come of a marriage arranged like that?--in that cold-blooded fashion?” asked Bayre, warmly.
The girl blushed a deep red.
“My mother was a Frenchwoman,” she answered simply. “And if you know anything of France you must know that there it is not customary for girls to have so much freedom of choice as in England.”
“But you’re English--your father was an Englishman,” said Bayre, warmly. And then a bright thought struck him: “you see I, being your guardian’s nephew, may be looked upon as a sort of relation of yours--”
“Oh, no,” cried Miss Eden, rippling with smiles.
“Yes, indeed,” persisted Bayre, emphatically. “My uncle is nothing but an old fossil, who knows little more of the world than you do yourself. I begin to see that it’s nothing less than my duty to bring my own greater knowledge and experience to bear upon this matter. In short, if your guardian won’t do his duty and exercise a proper discretion on your behalf, I shall have to do it for him, and, and--”
“And choose a husband for me?” asked Miss Eden, in the most solemn and demure tone, the while her bright eyes flashed with the humour of the thing.
“Exactly,” replied Bayre, as solemnly as she, while his eyes looked into hers, seeing the roguery in them and answering it with mischief in his own.
By this time both were bubbling over with suppressed laughter, enjoying intensely this huge joke of his vague relationship and assumed authority. Bayre’s disappointment and irritation at his uncle’s snub were both forgotten. Miss Eden had forgotten, too, that her errand in meeting the young man had been one of benevolent sympathy and consolation. They had wandered together away from the opening in the cliff and downwards among the dead fern and brambles towards the shore. Bayre had had to help her, now and then, with a strong hand holding hers as they stepped over loose stones and thorny clumps of bush and bramble. It was pleasant, exciting, this aimless ramble in the winter sunlight, with the sea breeze blowing in their faces and the splash of the waves in their ears.
And then, suddenly, there broke upon them a sound less pleasant, because it called them back to life and prose. This was the voice of Repton calling to Bayre by name. The young man stood still and looked round. Neither Repton nor Southerley was in sight yet, but a glimpse of an old blue blouse and of a crouching back behind a clump of bushes at the top of the cliff showed that the idyllic promenade of the two young people had not been unobserved.
Miss Eden saw the blouse at the same moment, and she frowned angrily.
“There’s that old spy, Pierre Vazon,” cried she. “Nothing that happens here escapes the eyes of him or his daughter. They’re a pair of ignorant, cunning peasants of the lowest type, and I hate them both.”
“Is that his daughter who opened the door of my uncle’s house to us?”
“Yes. She rules everything indoors and her father everything out.”
“The man has a horrible face, and I don’t like the woman’s much better,” said Bayre. “Does my uncle like these people?”
Miss Eden hesitated.
“I sometimes think,” said she, “that--that he’s afraid of them.”
“Afraid! Why should he be?”
“I--don’t--know.” Before Bayre could ask another question the voices of his two friends, still shouting to him, were heard again from above; and the girl, whose manner had changed since the interruption, gave a glance up towards the spot where the peasant was watching, and leapt down towards the shore, away from her companion. “Your friends are calling you, Mr Bayre. Good-bye,” she said, as, with a little inclination of the head, she disappeared in the direction of one of the caverns with which the cliffs were honeycombed.