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.