CHAPTER IX.

A MYSTERY

Madame Nicolas looked at Bartlett Bayre with a shrewd suspicion in her eyes. It was evident that the young man took much more than the interest of a casual stranger in Miss Eden’s disappearance.

She shrugged her shoulders and shook her head.

“_Ma foi_, monsieur, I do not myself think it so surprising that a good-looking girl like Miss Eden should object to being married off to a man old enough to be her father, and by no means attractive at that. Not that I have a word to say against Monsieur Blaise, who is a most worthy gentleman, and well-to-do. But one must make allowance for the natural tastes of a young girl, especially of a girl whose father was an Englishman.”

Bayre heard very little of these words, and he presently broke in, with great suddenness,--

“When did she disappear?”

“I understand she has not been seen for three days.”

Bayre rose from the table with a strange look on his face and walked straight towards the door.

“Where are you going, monsieur?” asked his hostess, rather alarmed by the effect of her words.

She knew of the relationship between him and the recluse of Creux, and she felt uneasy lest the young man should take some aggressive action against the magnate, which might possibly get her into bad odour among her neighbours. For, like all the inhabitants of small islands, the natives were clannish, and strongly resented any interference from outsiders.

Bayre had his fingers upon the handle.

“I’m going to try to find out what has become of her,” said he, “and to see the Creux people about it.”

“Oh, nobody fears a tragedy,” she said quickly, though her tone was not particularly reassuring. “It is some girlish freak, no doubt. And in a few days she will return to her guardian’s house, satisfied with having given this little proof of spirit.”

But this suggestion did not satisfy Bayre, who knew more of the sensitive and emotional girl, after two or three short interviews, than the majority of the islanders would have found out in a couple of years’ acquaintance. Remembering as he did the change which came over her after her introduction to her proposed husband, he could not even feel that her disappearance was a matter of great surprise. That she could conceive the idea of running away, either back to the school she had left in France, or to friends in England, seemed to him a perfectly possible thing. Yet surely, if she had followed such a course, she would have been recognised on the journey! The boats were not crowded at that early season of the year, and she was of course well-known by sight to the people whom she must meet on such a journey.

Full of fears which he dared not define, Bayre left the house and made his way towards the harbour. As luck would have it, one of the very first persons who attracted his attention as he approached the quay was the peasant girl who had placed the baby in its basket among the luggage of the three friends. She was some distance away from him, sauntering towards him with a market basket on her arm, and chatting with another girl of about the same age and class. He saw her before she saw him; but as soon as he attracted her attention by quickening his pace to meet her, she stopped, turned pale, uttered a frightened exclamation, then turned and ran away at the top of her speed, her sabots clanking noisily on the ground as she went.

Of course he gave chase. But in a locality where she was at home and he was not, it was easy for her to escape him.

Baffled in his pursuit, and rendered more curious than ever by the guilty knowledge he had descried on her face, Bayre stopped in a chase which was exciting the amusement of casual passers-by, and retraced his steps towards the quay.

He decided that it would not be very difficult to trace this girl at a later time, since it was plain that she frequented the town, even if she did not live in it. In the meantime his first inquiries must be made in Creux.

He got nothing out of the boatmen who took him across to the little island; they had heard of the disappearance of the young lady, and one crudely and callously suggested that she might have drowned herself as the result of a love affair.

It was not gay at Creux! And for a young girl, too! Monsieur Bayre was an eccentric, a droll man! Strange things had happened on the island before. But there--let each man mind his own affairs and the world would go on very well.

Neither of the men would be more explicit than this: they had their living to get, and great part of it was got in the summer time by taking visitors to Guernsey across the water to Creux to see the famous museum, as they called the treasure-filled mansion of the old recluse.

Bayre began to understand how little sympathy he should meet with in the course of his investigations. Whatever freaks his uncle might be guilty of, he was held in reverence here as a Grand Seigneur, a man of wealth, and a source of legitimate income or of splendid charity.

When Bayre landed on his uncle’s little island, his overcoat buttoned up to the chin, his cap well drawn over his eyes, and his body bent to meet keen wind and driving snow, he knew that for all he might find out concerning Miss Eden’s disappearance and his uncle’s eccentricities he must depend upon himself alone.

Nevertheless, he took the strongly-built cottage of Pierre Vazon on his way, although the truth was the last thing he expected to hear from the lips of that unprepossessing person.

The home of the Vazons was a large stone-built cottage, built on a rather bleak spot, and sheltered only by a few now bare trees, and by its own outbuildings. There was nobody to be seen about outside, and it is impossible to exaggerate the desolation of the aspect of the whole island, seen thus through the driving snow, which had already covered the ground to the extent of an inch or so, making the sea around it appear of an inky darkness.

Bayre went boldly up to the cottage and looked in at the window as he passed. And he received a great shock on seeing that Marie Vazon, who was sitting by the window with her sewing, had a child, a well-dressed child, in a cradle at her feet.

Here then was a blow at one of his cherished beliefs. It was Marie Vazon who had charge of his uncle’s infant son, and the identity of the child who had been entrusted to the care of him and his friends was now as mysterious as ever.

As he stopped at the window, gazing in with an expression of bewilderment and dismay on his face, Marie Vazon noticed that a shadow was darkening the window, and glanced up.

He saw a swift look of amazement and alarm pass over the stolid peasant face, and then she looked quickly down again and went on with her sewing.

Bayre hesitated as to whether he should enter the cottage and make some inquiries there, or push on for his uncle’s house. While he debated with himself, he heard a rough voice behind him, and Pierre Vazon came up, greeting him in his French _patois_, in a manner half servile, half insolent.

“You are back again soon, monsieur,” said he, placing himself in front of the young man, and looking at him askance. “It is bad weather for travelling now.”

“Yes,” said Bayre.

“Monsieur must have strong reasons to bring him across in the snow and the bitter cold,” went on the man, with scarcely veiled curiosity.

“I hear you have had a strange event since my last visit,” said Bayre, without answering his implied question. “Is it true that Miss Eden is no longer here with her guardian?”

“_Parbleu_, monsieur, so it seems. We have seen nothing of her for two days. But your English young ladies--and Miss Eden was very English--they are so independent, we were not much surprised to find she had ended by thinking Creux too quiet for her.”

“You mean that no attempt has been made to find her, either by you or by her guardian, Mr Bayre?”

“Well, monsieur, I hunted all over the island for her, and my daughter too, as well as she could. But she has Monsieur Bayre’s child to look after,” went on the man, keeping his interlocutor fixed steadily with his small slits of eyes, “so that she has not much time for anything else.”

It occurred to Bayre as strange that the man should watch him in this peculiar fashion while he made this statement about the child, but he could think of no adequate reason for doubting the truth of his words. At the same time an impulse of curiosity made him ask abruptly,--

“Can I see the child?”

Pierre looked at him askance and shook his head.

He seemed to be searching for an excuse, Bayre thought. At last he found one.

“Since you have not been received by Monsieur Bayre, monsieur,” said Vazon, “I don’t know whether I ought to let you see his child.”

Bayre shrugged his shoulders.

“As you like,” said he.

And turning on his heel abruptly, he saw, as he passed the cottage window once more, that Marie Vazon was no longer sitting within. Looking round, he caught sight of Pierre disappearing hastily within the door of the cottage, and heard him turn the key in the lock. So, with one more look in at the window to ascertain whether the baby in the cradle was really alive, a fact which the infant obligingly proved by thrusting a crumpled fist outside its covering, he started in the direction of the mansion.

What was wrong? What was going on here, in this forgotten little spot of earth cut off by the sea from the rest of mankind?

That something was amiss Bayre was sure. Vague as his suspicions were, impossible as it was for him to make out what it was that he feared, there was such a strangely unsatisfactory atmosphere surrounding Pierre Vazon and his daughter, such a disquieting air of mingled servility and insolence in their address, such an expression of low cunning on both their faces, that the more he considered the matter the more uneasy Bayre became.

That they had had any hand in the disappearance of Miss Eden he did not believe. Why should they lay themselves open to ugly suspicions by interfering with a person who was not likely to stand in the way of their interests? If she had been the darling of her guardian’s heart, and they had suspected him of designing to benefit her in his will to the exclusion of their claims upon him, Bayre might have conceived it possible that the cunning peasants should have motives for getting her out of the way.

But everything went to show that, so far from being fond of his ward, the old man looked upon her simply as a burden and an unwelcome guest, to be got rid of by marriage as quickly as possible.

Far more likely was it that the high-spirited girl, after a scene of resistance to old Mr Bayre’s wishes in the matter of her marriage, had broken the ties between her and her guardian and left the island of her own accord.

But surmise was not enough: he felt that he must have fact to satisfy him. And the person to whom he would apply was his uncle himself. He would not be put off this time. And as he marched up the avenue under the snow-laden branches of the leafless trees, he resolved that he would take no denials, that he would gain admittance by hook or by crook to the presence of the mysterious recluse, and would try to probe to the reason of the strange dislike to meeting him which his uncle had shown.

He pulled the old-fashioned iron handle, and heard the bell clang through the house. Almost without a moment’s waiting he found the door opened; but a new thrill of suspicion and dismay struck a chill to his heart when he found that it was again Marie Vazon who had opened it to him.

His astonishment for the moment took away his powers of speech. She must have run up to the great house while he was in conversation with Pierre. And his hopes of getting admittance grew low as he met her cunning blue eyes and noted that she did not open the door very wide.

She waited for him to speak.

“I wish to see Monsieur Bayre, my uncle,” he said boldly at last.

Marie drew the door a little closer, shook her head, and smiled.

“Ah, monsieur, I regret that Monsieur Bayre cannot receive you--cannot receive anybody. He is ill--ill in bed,” said she.

“Will you take him my card? And I should like to scribble a few words on it first.”

He had taken out his pocket-book and found a card before he perceived that Marie Vazon had deftly and without noise put the chain on the door. Too indignant to say another word, he gave up the intention of writing anything on the card, and merely passing it to the girl through the narrow opening that was left, he went away.

What did this mean?

If he had not remembered that it was his uncle himself who had given the first intimation of his unwillingness to meet him, Bayre would now have suspected that the Vazons, for some reason of their own, wished to prevent the coming together of their master and himself. But with his two attempts to speak to his uncle, and his previous repulsion from the very house fresh in his mind, the young man could scarcely entertain this idea.

What then could be the motive for this marvellous eccentricity? He had never heard, from any of the inhabitants of the islands, a hint that his uncle was other than perfectly sane, or he might have ascribed this shyness to a caprice of insanity.

On the contrary, although all were agreed that his two recent misfortunes, the loss of his wife and the death of his cousin, had had a great effect upon him, yet everybody spoke highly of the old man as a good neighbour and a generous benefactor. How could his nephew’s visit in the company of his two friends be looked upon as an intrusion which justified such persistent and aggressive snubs?--snubs which seemed inconsistent with the known character of the man, and which nothing in his nephew’s personal history could be held to justify.

So mysterious, so incomprehensible did his uncle’s whole conduct seem, that Bayre conquered his first impulse, which was to turn his back upon the house with all possible speed, and resolved instead to play the spy a little, not more in the interests of his own natural curiosity than in his intense desire to learn what had become of Miss Eden.

When he had reached the avenue, therefore, he slackened his steps, and getting through the thin hedge on the left without difficulty, approached the house once more, this time by way of the other side, where a thick plantation had been partly cleared for a smooth lawn which, now an undulating sheet of snow, stretched away from the house to the sheltering wood behind.

A curious building it was, this low-roofed, rambling mansion, which had evidently grown to its present dimensions from a most modest country villa. The original building it was that Bayre came to first, a white-washed pile of simplest architecture, the ground-floor windows of which were closed up with heavy shutters. Most desolate did they look, these long windows down to the ground, with the closed shutters behind them. Beyond these he came to a stone extension, with a row of windows narrow and high, at least ten feet from the ground. He looked up at them with interest. There were no shutters to these, but he could see that there were iron bars on the inner side.

Bayre went further in his search and passed round a protruding wing, beyond which was a courtyard where the stones were moss-grown, little patches of green peeping up between the snow-drifts.

There was a sort of atmosphere about this corner which suggested the home of the sleeping beauty, for the trees had been allowed to grow as they liked, and their branches straggled across the pathway which led from this point through the wood. There was a stable, small for the size of the mansion, as was to be expected on the island: it appeared to be untenanted, and one of the windows was broken. The servants’ quarters, which were at this end of the house, had a desolate appearance. Bayre could hear certain sounds of work going on within; but it was rather the clanking of one pair of sabots on the flagged floor, and the clatter caused by one, or at most two, pair of hands, than the life and bustle of a large establishment.

He turned into the footpath, came upon a stiff-terraced garden with some mournful evergreens and still more mournful statues, and turned back towards the house.

It was that row of long, narrow windows high up in the wall that fascinated him and made him wonder what was behind: for this part of the house looked like a scrap of mediævalism wedged awkwardly between the products of other periods. Here, he thought, must be the treasures of which he had heard so much. As he stood looking upwards and wondering what was within, a strange sound reached his ears, as of the splintering of wood, the rattling of boards, and blows with a heavy instrument upon some hard substance. A movable pane in the window immediately over his head, opened for ventilation, enabled him to ascertain that these sounds came from the interior of the building.

The surface of the stone wall was rough: the young man’s curiosity was great. After a moment’s hesitation he threw his scruples to the winds, and with the assistance of an ill-kept growth of ivy which covered the lower part of the wall under some of the windows, managed to hoist himself to the level of one of them and to look in.

When his eyes, dazzled by the glare of the snow outside, had got used to the obscurity within, he found himself gazing upon a spectacle so strange, so grim, that he began to have a sort of feeling that the cold must have benumbed his senses and distorted his vision, so that real objects took the fantastic shape of things seen in dreams.

In the dimness of an open timber roof he saw winged things fluttering about, perching on the beams, uttering odd little twitterings and cooings in the darkness. On the wall opposite to him there were tapestries, some almost colourless with age, and some beautiful in tints which, in the dim light, all took a softening tone of tender mouse grey. There were glints of steel, too, against these hangings; here and there a ghostly figure in ancient armour, with lance in rest and helmet plumed, stood out from the dim background.

Clinging on with difficulty to the narrow slanting ledge, Bayre looked in with eager eyes, saw these things before him, and at one end, hazy in the distance, a gallery crossing the great hall from end to end, where old silver lamps hung by chains from above, and where the pipes of an organ and the graceful outline of a harp gleamed faintly out of the misty grey.

The other end of the hall he could not see. But he saw pictures hanging below the level of the windows, and on the floor beneath something that groped its way along slowly and painfully like an animal hunting for food.

Dog, or wild beast, or what? For a long time Bayre strained his eyes, unable to make out what that dark object was that groped and groped, at first quietly, and then with a sudden impulse of impatience, in the obscurity below him.

His heart seemed to leap up with an indescribable sensation which was partly horror and partly sheer amazement, when the creature suddenly reared up from the dark boards of the floor and showed the face of a man, withered, haggard, tense with an unearthly eagerness of longing.

“My uncle!”

The words were formed by the young man’s lips, but they did not reach the stage of uttered sound. He was, indeed, too sick with amazement at this uncanny sight to be able to speak at that moment.

Before he quite knew what the impression was which this sight had made upon him, the figure in the old dark coat was bending again upon the floor, and Bayre saw him raise a hatchet over his head and bring it down sharply upon the boards.

That fact was enough. Only one explanation, surely, could there be of the action of a man who would set to work to destroy his own dwelling in such a manner.

But before the young man had had time for another look, another thought, he suddenly found himself seized by the legs from below, and turning, saw that Pierre Vazon, with alarm and dismay on his face, and another and younger man, also in a blouse, had made him prisoner.