THE
MIS-RULE OF THREE

The Diggings were in a street somewhere off Tottenham Court Road, in a tall, old-fashioned, roomy house which had seen its best days, but which still made a valiant attempt to hold its own in the respectable class in a neighbourhood where respectability is not exactly rampant.

For dingy foreigners of the undesirable class abound exceedingly in those parts, and undesirables of home growth are not unknown there. Indeed, individuals of both these types did get in, now and then, within the hospitable shelter of No. 46 itself, in spite of the anxiety of Mrs Inkersole, the landlady, to preserve the high tone of the house.

But whoever might occupy the ground floor and the first floor of No. 46, whoever might enjoy the solid mahogany and second-hand chenille curtains of the former, or bask in the luxury of alleged Sheraton upholstered in vivid plush and brocade in the latter, the historical Diggings on the second floor remained for month after month in the possession of the famous Three, who were known among the landlady’s family and servants as “The gentlemen.”

Not only did “the gentlemen” occupy the two rooms which constituted the second floor, but they overflowed upwards into two of the small apartments of the rabbit warren which is always to be found on the upper floors of the typical London lodging-house. One of these small upper rooms belonged to Bartlett Bayre, a tall, thin, dark-skinned, black-haired young man, who was a clerk at Somerset House in the first place, and a struggling writer of loftiest ambition but as yet very indifferent success in the second. His room was remarkable for great outward neatness, though the internal condition of the wardrobe and chest of drawers left much to be desired in the way of order.

The little room next to Bayre’s was occupied by Ted Southerley, a big, broad, stolid, red-faced Northerner, who was “on” two or three papers of no world-wide circulation and with no very certain prospects, and on one which actually paid its way and afforded a modest pittance to its most energetic if, perhaps, slightly commonplace contributor.

The third member of the confraternity was a painter, to whom neither the Academy nor the New Gallery had as yet opened its doors. As the happy possessor of a small allowance from home, which enabled him to enjoy the luxury of being idle and the further luxury of pretending to be very busy at the same time, Jan Repton occupied the place of honour among the three friends: that is to say, he had the back room on the second floor all to himself as combined studio and bedroom. This apartment, therefore, offered a picturesque combination; an easel being placed near the window for the benefit of the north light, while a small bedstead stood in one corner, and a platform for a model occupied the place of honour in the middle of the room. The bedstead was used by day for books, newspapers and parcels of various kinds. The dressing-table made a convenient hat and coat stand; while the washstand was rendered picturesque with a display of palettes, canvases, paint-brushes, and all the paraphernalia of the artist’s profession.

On occasions of state, when friends or cousins from the country were to be entertained, such choice bits of this outfit as seemed adapted to the purposes of the picturesque were transferred to the sitting-room in the front, together with the easel containing the picture upon which Repton was engaged, the model platform and a few bits of cheap brocade, remnants bought at drapers’ sales, to be thrown at random across the well-worn and springless sofa and over the backs of the lodging-house chairs. Also, on these occasions, the solid square table, which would then have been particularly useful, was thrust into the bedroom at the back, so that the visitors might have their tea uncomfortably in corners, on their own laps, in what was felt to be the orthodox studio fashion.

Bayre grumbled on these occasions, objecting to this “faking up” of an unreal atmosphere of artistic luxury to which they were unaccustomed. Ted Southerley growled more openly at the unnecessary discomfort the plan entailed. But Jan Repton was inexorable. Art was superior to all things else: and the artistic atmosphere, according to him, “gave a tone,” which he was not going to sacrifice for any utilitarian whims of “you two fellows.”

It may be mentioned that “Jan” was an assumed name and not Repton’s real baptismal prænomen. He had, in fact, been christened plain “John”; but finding the appellation unsatisfying, he replaced it by the three simple letters which gave him at once a distinction in his small circle, which the circle did not hesitate to inform him was the only one he would ever possess.

It was after an entertainment which had not been altogether satisfactory, Repton having tried to sing and Bayre to play the banjo, both with more exuberant applause than real success, that they were rearranging the furniture in its everyday position one November evening when a certain discontent which had of late been growing in Bayre’s breast reached a momentous crisis.

“I tell you what it is, Repton,” said he, as he managed, after fearful struggles, to get the fourth and last leg of the table through the door into the sitting-room, “all this beastly turn-out and turning everything upside down whenever your friends and relations put in an appearance here is perfectly sickening. Have friends by all means if you like, though Southerley and I can do without denuding half the country parishes in England of their inhabitants at regular intervals to fill our room and eat our bread-and-butter.”

“Bother your bread-and-butter!” said Repton, cheerfully, as he tilted the table over into its place in the middle of the room, and dragged on the dark green tapestry tablecloth with which it was a point of honour to cover the much-dented sham mahogany top. “You could have your own relations here if you liked, or if you’ve got any. I’m not going to let myself grow into a moping misanthrope for you, or for Southerley either, and so I tell you.”

“Nobody wants you to grow into a moping misanthrope, or into anything else you don’t like,” boomed out burly Ted Southerley from the cosy if slightly battered armchair by the fire into which he had dropped with his pipe when the ladies went away. “But I do think, Repton, for all our sakes, you might exercise the principle of judicious selection among your acquaintances, and especially you might introduce a little more variety among the ladies. Your female cousins are thoroughly charming, I admit, but they do run a little to the same type now, don’t they?”

“You have to take your cousins as you can get them,” replied Repton, cheerfully. “Some of us would be glad enough to have cousins at all; and if they were such beauties that they were run after by half London, why, you couldn’t expect them to come up to take tea with us on a second floor now, could you?”

“I shouldn’t expect it,” snapped Bayre. “And more than that, if I have to expect it now it’s not because I like it. To have to sit for two hours listening to a sandy-haired girl who can talk about nothing but the theatres and the opera, and who is trying all the time to impress you with the idea that she belongs to a circle in society where she certainly never set foot herself, and about which you yourself know little and care less, is no end of a bore.”

“She moves in a circle a precious sight better than yours!” retorted Repton, nettled. “And as for talking, she was only trying to find something to say because you were too surly to open your own mouth. And as for her being sandy—”

“I thought you didn’t like women to be intellectual, Bayre,” put in Southerley, anxious to prevent a quarrel. “I can’t make out what it is you want.”

Bayre, thus challenged, sat on the edge of the table, put his hand in his pocket, swung his leg, and laid down the law upon the subject of the Eternal Feminine thus:—

“I like a woman,” said he, “who exhales femininity at every pore. That is to say, one who is above all things modest and even somewhat shy; one who says little, does not trouble her head about the arts or sciences, or about intellectual pursuits, when compared with the interests of the home. There I imagine her supreme; calm, serene, orderly, diffusing a spirit of comfort, an atmosphere of peace, wherever she appears. She has no thought of “Society” in the modern slang sense, because for her Society is concentrated in her home, in the little circle of human beings who depend upon her, as they would upon an all-wise, all-providing, all-healing fairy, for help and sympathy and sunny kindness.”

“What you want is a housekeeper who will darn your socks, cook your mutton chop, and give her whole mind, what she has of it, to making you comfortable,” said Repton, scoffingly.

“Not altogether that, though socks are more comfortable when darned than when in holes, as we occasionally wear them at present, and chops are undoubtedly better cooked than raw,” replied Bayre, suavely.

“What do you think of his precious feminine ideal, Southerley?” asked Repton, with a superb raising of his light eyebrows.

“I think it’s all jolly rot,” said Ted, promptly. “I don’t mean I disapprove of a woman’s being domestic in her tastes—somebody must look after the house, and see to the dinner and all that sort of thing, I suppose; and certainly none of those things would get done very well if they were left to me—but a woman who had her hands always in dough or in dusters, whose mind was divided between her saucepan and her cotton reels, would drive me mad.”

“Do you want small talk and Society slip-slop, then, as accomplishments?” sneered Bayre.

“No,” said Southerley. “What I admire in a woman is spirit and fire, life and animation. My ideal is a girl who can ride like the wind, whose feet dance as she walks, whose eyes are all aglow with life and vitality, and there—I shouldn’t mind if she were a bit of a genius into the bargain!”

“A genius!” roared Repton, derisively. “What should a female genius want with you, Southerley?”

“Well, he’s welcome to her!” put in Bayre with contempt. “It’s the first time I ever heard a sane man say he admired that sort of thing in a woman! And I should think it would be the last! Intellect in a woman—intellect out of the common, I mean: of course I don’t mean that I admire a born fool—is an evil fungus, hideous and useless if not actually noxious in itself, and fatal, too, to the object upon which it has made its home.”

“Very poetical, but very absurd,” remarked Southerley. “The female genius you sneer at so loftily would be much more likely even to manage the house well than the sheep-woman you think so much of. And if she didn’t, at any rate she wouldn’t bore you to death as the other would.”

“Why don’t you get hold of some of your sheep and bring ’em here and let’s see if we can worship ’em too?” suggested Repton, derisively. “They’re common enough; surely you must have a few sisters and cousins and aunts who answer to the description!”

“No,” said Bayre, stolidly. “It happens that I haven’t. I have only one relation in the world that I know anything about, and that’s not much.”

“And who’s he—or she?”

“He is an elder brother of my late father’s, a very rich man who lives a kind of hermit’s life on one of the smaller of the Channel Islands. A bachelor and reputed to be a miser.”

“A bachelor! And very rich! Why don’t you go and look him up?” said Southerley, the matter-of-fact.

“Don’t know that he wants me. If he does, he’s kept the fact very much to himself,” said Bayre.

“If I had a rich bachelor uncle,” said Repton, lightly, “I should go and get him to leave me all his money, and then find a handy cliff—”

“It would be better, first of all,” said Southerley, gravely, “to find out just what ‘very rich’ means. It would be a pity to go and burden one’s soul with a crime under a decent figure. Old gentlemen who live shut up often get the reputation of great wealth on something under two hundred a year!”

“That’s a point worth considering,” admitted Bayre.

“Look here, you fellows,” said Repton, who had grown suddenly thoughtful, “wouldn’t it be a lark if we were all of us to go to the place—wherever it is—Jersey and Guernsey isn’t it? Or is it the Scillies?—and hunt up this recluse? If he didn’t take a fancy to Bayre—and I see heaps of reasons why he shouldn’t—why, he might to you or me, you know, Southerley? And anyhow it would be a bit of a spree, and I could find something to paint. Perhaps get known as the Jersey man, or the Guernsey man, or the Sark man, and make it impossible for anybody to think about any of those places for ever after without thinking of Jan Repton.”

“And I,” said Southerley, “might get some decent ‘copy’ out of them, I fancy. Shirts for sailors at Jersey and Guernsey; cows at Alderney; rocks, I suppose, at Sark. All interesting things that people are dying to know all about. This is to be thought of, Bayre.”

“What on earth you want to go to any place for in order to write about it I don’t know,” observed Bayre, grimly. “For no matter what you see or what you hear, you always manage to report it under such a veneer of commonplace that nobody would ever think you got your information out of anything more up-to-date than the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica!”

“My dear fellow, when you write for commonplace people you must write in a commonplace way. Now you, who write for the people that read your works—people so uncommon that they don’t exist—can ransack the dictionary for obsolete adjectives and introduce compound words that nobody has ever heard of with impunity.”

“I may not find it easy to get to my public,” said Bayre, in whose dark face a flush was rising, “but when I do it won’t consist of the sweepings of the counter and the stable, or of the representatives of the culture created by Snick-snacks.”

“Look here,” broke in Repton, who perceived that the atmosphere was growing rather sultry, “without any chaff, don’t you think a week’s outing might be got out of this idea? It’s the right time of year, in the first place, to see the islands in their everyday aspect, with no taint of the tourist about them.”

“And the right time of year for an awfully rough sea passage!” observed Southerley, who was not a “good sailor.”

Bayre played with his moustache and reflected.

“When you come to think of it,” said he at last, “it’s not such a bad notion of yours, Repton, that we should go and pay the old gentleman a surprise visit. I’ve never been to the Channel Islands, and a blow across the sea would get rid of some of the cobwebs of this infernal city.”

“Don’t abuse old London, I beg,” said Southerley. “It’s the only place worth living in for a man with any brains in his head.”

Repton and Bayre both turned on him looks of scorn. The fact that he had been, in a small and modest way, successful in those callings of Art and Literature in which they themselves had so far failed—for Southerley had had his sketches reproduced in the not over-particular columns of a Sunday paper—rankled in the breasts of both.

“It happens,” said Bayre, “that I could get a holiday now if I liked, and I might not be able to do so later. If you fellows agree to go I’ll make arrangements as soon as you like. I’ve been getting restless lately. Working with no result is not good enough: dull routine work for one’s bread-and-butter and nothing more’s not good enough: this beastly old city’s not good enough: life’s not good enough!”

With which drastic comment on things in general and his own affairs in particular, Bayre began to swing up and down the room at a great rate, with his hands in his pockets and his dark eyes gleaming rather savagely from out of his pale face, to which dark hair worn long gave a certain individuality at which Southerley, with his close-cropped, conventional head, and Repton, with what his friends called his sandy stubble, scoffed long and loudly.

Though neither of the other young men chafed as much under the conditions of existence as Bayre did, the suggestion of a change, of a possibly romantic adventure with a sort of object, seized both of them.

And the end of it was that, without wasting much time in discussion, they all made arrangements for a journey together to the Channel Islands, to hunt out in company this mysterious rich bachelor uncle of Bayre’s in whose existence, perhaps, two of the party scarcely believed at all.

CHAPTER II.
THEY FIND THE GIRL

It was on a Saturday, at 9.15 in the evening, that the three travellers started from Paddington on their search for adventures and Bayre’s rich uncle.

It was very cold, and there was an ill-concealed sentiment abroad that they had chosen a time of year for their expedition which, though distinctly favourable to their chances of having the train, the boat and the islands a good deal to themselves, was not so well chosen as regarded their own comfort and enjoyment.

It was chilly work, as Repton observed, turning out of the train at Weymouth between two and three o’clock in the morning; and when they arrived at Guernsey, after a long and rough sea passage, in the gloom of a November morning, all three travellers were inclined to think that the mildness of the climate had been exaggerated, and to wonder what on earth they had left dear, dirty dark London for at such an unseasonable time.

They had heard, through some acquaintance, before leaving town, of a quiet little lodging-house kept by a Frenchwoman, where they had made up their minds to stay, in pursuance of their determination to follow the usual tourist plans as little as possible.

Their decision involved a rather long walk through streets which looked, in the circumstances, gloomy, grimy and mean; and when at last they arrived at Madame Nicolas’ modest establishment, not having taken the precaution to write and inform her of their coming, they found the place in a decidedly out-of-season condition.

However, Madame, a brisk, black-eyed little woman, and her one servant, a raw-boned, good-humoured country girl in short skirt, jacket tied in by a long apron, and round close cap, were hospitable and even enthusiastic, and within half an hour the travellers were sitting down, in a prim, bare-looking salle-à-manger, to a breakfast of rolls, hot coffee and eggs.

Battered and disorganised by their journey, the three friends passed a lazy day, not straying beyond the limits of the town. They had already, in some measure, lost sight of the avowed object of their journey when Bayre, sitting back comfortably in a chair by the fire while Aurélie was clearing the table after their six-o’clock dinner, asked the girl, in French, if she knew anything about the little island of Creux a few miles away.

Repton and Southerley looked at their companion with eyes full of envy and disgust. Repton had picked up a few words of passable French in the course of summer excursions to Boulogne and other not unknown resorts of the Londoner. Southerley could read French books, but had the proper contempt of a University man for niceties of foreign pronunciation, so that when he conversed in any language but his own he was for the most part unappreciated. Bayre, on the other hand, had condescended to master the French idiom, and had thereby laid himself open to the suspicion of having a terrible past.

What could the ordinary virtuous Englishman want with a thorough command of any tongue but his own? So reasoned his two less-accomplished companions, as, with jealousy in their hearts and scorn on their lips, they watched and listened, and understood a little of what he said but not much of what the voluble Aurélie replied in her Guernsey patois.

Oh, yes, Aurélie knew Creux very well; she had been there more than once herself, but ah! people did not care to go much to Creux since the strange things that had happened there of late, things that made people fancy all was not right on that desolate island. She for one would be very sorry to have to live there, and to lie for nearly a month after she was dead above the ground without a holy word said by priest or pastor!

And Aurélie, who showed by her excitement that she was referring to some event that had recently agitated the neighbourhood, put down her plates, planted her large hands on her hips, and nodded her head with much meaning.

“Why, is it so far away as all that? I thought it was only three or four miles from Guernsey and that communication was constant,” said Bayre.

“Yes, it is not further than that, and when the sea is smooth and the wind light one sails across easily enough. But in stormy weather, like that we had a few months ago, ah! then it is different. It’s all very well when the boat is out in the middle of the channel, if it is guided by a man who understands the currents and the way the wind comes through between the islands. But the shore of Creux is as steep as a wall, and one can neither embark nor land there in bad weather. And that’s how it was that Mees Ford, the cross-grained old cousin who was housekeeper so long to the rich Englishman”—at this point Repton and Southerley strained their attention to the utmost, for they knew that they had got upon the track of Bayre’s uncle already—“had to lie unburied for so long, and that’s how it was that the coffin, with her dead body in it, was washed away at the very moment when it was being lowered into the boat which was to bring it across for burial in our cemetery here.”

Aurélie shuddered at the gruesome story, of which Bayre alone understood the whole, although his two friends gathered enough of it to insist upon the repetition of the tale in such English as the girl could command.

“And when did all this happen?” asked Southerley, who had the reporter’s liking for details.

“One, two, three, four, five, six montz ago,” replied Aurélie, helping out his presumably weak intellect by illustration on her fingers. “Ze weazer was stormy, and ze sea like mountains—so high. It was like zat for near four week.”

“It must be jolly lonely over there,” remarked Repton.

“And was the rich Englishman drowned when the accident happened?” asked Southerley.

“Monsieur Bayre? Oh, no. He save himself, zough he cannot save ze boat from turning over. It was found turned upside down later,” said the girl; “but ze coffin, no, zat was not found.”

“Did you ever hear of this cousin of your uncle’s, Bayre?” said Southerley, who thought the story an odd one, and thought also that the imagination of the islanders might perhaps have been at work upon it.

“I knew he had a housekeeper who was some relation,” answered Bayre.

“Yes, yes, cousin,” interrupted Aurélie, vivaciously, nodding her head two or three times to emphasise her words to the two less-accomplished Englishmen. “She and Monsieur Bayre zey was so much like one anozer, ze same long face like wood, long chin, straight mouz, small eyes zat looked out of ze corners—so!”

“You know him, then? You knew them both?” said Bayre.

“I have seen zem, but not often. Monsieur Bayre, wiz his hard face, and his dress, not like a gentleman’s, but like a fisherman’s, wiz his jersey, his sea-boots, his cap wiz a peak—I have seen him in his boat. Mees Ford I have also seen, when I go to Creux, walking in se cour of ze house, what you call ze yard. But zey do not come here often. Old Pierre Vazon, and his daughter Marie—zey fetch ze sings from St Luke’s for ze château.”

“Château, eh?” said Southerley.

“Oh, that’s what any house that’s not a cottage is called,” explained Bayre. “It doesn’t necessarily mean a mansion. Have you seen Mr Bayre much lately, Aurélie?”

“Not so much since he married his young wife—” began the girl.

But the exclamations of the three young men checked her and made her look round at them.

“Ah! You know him, perhaps, yourselves?” said she quickly, with a sort of guilty look.

After a moment’s breathless pause they all began to ask her questions at once, and while she hesitated, confused, as to what sort of replies she should make, the door opened quickly and Madame Nicolas, whose attention had perhaps been attracted by the noise they all made by crying out at the same time, came in and looked angrily at the servant.

Whether she merely considered that Aurélie was wasting her time, or whether she was anxious to discourage gossip about her neighbours, it was impossible to say. But certain it is that Madame did not leave the room until the maid had gathered up the last vestige of the meal, and that the young men heard her speak in tones of reproof to the girl when the door was closed.

Bayre looked at his companions and laughed.

“Well, Repton, what do you say to that?” said he. “Where are my chances of insinuating myself into the position of heir now?”

“Things begin to look dicky, certainly,” assented Repton, with a mournful shake of the head. “But it’s all your own fault. You should have come sooner.”

“Wonder what the wife’s like!” remarked Southerley. “Wonder where he got her from!”

“Married his kitchenmaid probably,” said Repton. “A sort of Aurélie, I shouldn’t wonder, who wears an all-round cap and sabots.”

“My uncle is a gentleman, not a clod-hopper,” put in Bayre with warmth. “I think we may take it for granted he married a woman in his own rank of life. At least, I object to it’s being taken for granted that he didn’t.”

“My dear fellow, keep your hair on!” said Repton. “It’s quite permissible to wonder whether a man who goes about in a jersey and fisherman’s overalls did or did not marry to suit his rank, or marry to suit his tastes.”

The discussion threatened to grow warm, as discussions between the indiscreet Repton and the more serious Bayre often did. Southerley interposed by observing that they really had nothing to argue upon at present, and that they had better master their subject before they proceeded to disagree about it.

One source of information, however, they now found unavailable. Aurélie had evidently been frightened by her mistress into discretion, for she would answer no more questions about Monsieur Bayre, except by a significant shrug and shake of the head.

It was with a mind full of curiosity about his long-neglected uncle, therefore, that Bartlett Bayre strolled out, on the morning after their arrival in Guernsey, and made his way down to the harbour.

Southerley was there already, and Bayre saw at once, by the look of excitement in his usually lymphatic face, that something of interest had occurred.

“What’s up?” said Bayre, briefly.

“What’s up?” echoed Southerley, getting off the upturned boat on which he had been sitting, and speaking in a voice of mellifluous thunder. “Why, I’ve had an adventure.”

“Already?”

“Yes. At least, perhaps you won’t call it an adventure, but I do. You see that boat out there?”

He pointed to a half-open sailing-boat, strongly made, unpretentious, that stood out at sea a little way from the harbour. It had two small masts, but the sails were down and the little craft moved gently up and down with the swell of the water. There was only one person in it, a man, who sat almost motionless in the stern, with a pipe in his mouth. Bayre followed the direction of his friend’s finger with his eyes, and looked at the boat and its occupant.

“Well?” said he.

“She came ashore in that—” began Southerley.

“Who’s she?”

Southerley looked at him with his face aglow.

“Well, ‘she’ is my ideal, and there you are in a nutshell.”

“No, I’m not there in a nutshell. I don’t understand,” said Bayre, with stolid petulance.

“Oh, you have no imagination. I tell you there stepped ashore out of that battered old boat one of the loveliest creatures that ever walked.” Bayre looked incredulous, but his friend went on: “A queen disguised in a short stuff skirt and a plain jacket and thick boots, but a queen all the same. She skipped out of the boat like a fairy: she tripped along the harbour like a fairy. And I tell you it was all I could do not to run after her, follow her, try to get another look at her.”

“Why on earth didn’t you?” said Bayre, contemptuously.

“Because I couldn’t trust myself. I should have gone down on my knees in the mud and told her there and then that she was the pearl of women,” retorted Southerley, his enthusiasm growing under the stimulus of his companion’s contempt. “No, I must wait here till she comes back, and I shall wait if it’s a fortnight!”

Bayre laughed as he took a scrutinising look round.

“Is that your beauty?” asked he, as there emerged from among the old houses facing the harbour a girl of the middle height, dressed in a short skirt of coarse blue serge, and a thick jacket of pilot cloth with black horn buttons, with a little tasselled fisher-cap on her head. She moved easily and well in the thick, clumsy boots she wore; and her sparkling eyes, vivid complexion, and dark hair worn in a thick plait tied at the nape of the neck were attributes of an unmistakably pretty girl.

She had a large parcel in her arms, and she was followed by a small boy of the fisher class, who was staggering under half a dozen packages of goodly size.

On she came along the pier, picking her way with easy grace of movement among litter of ship’s lumber and cordage. It was the grace of over-brimming vitality, of youth and the joy of life. Against his will Bayre, too, found her fair.

“Didn’t I tell you?” said Southerley, enthusiastically, below his breath.

“She’s good-looking, of course,” admitted Bayre, grudgingly, “but it’s not my type.”

However this might be, he watched her as she came along, though with no such adoration as appeared in his companion’s eyes. With the ingratitude of her sex, however, it was at Bayre and not at Southerley that the girl glanced twice as she passed. And even when she had stopped near the landing-stage and taken her parcels from the boy she threw a third sidelong look at Bayre, a look which showed that for some reason he inspired her with at least a passing interest. Taking out her handkerchief, she waved it to the man in the boat, who took up his oars instead of hoisting a sail, and began slowly to return to the pier.

Once again the girl turned, glanced at Bayre, looked down at her parcels, and seemed to hesitate. Southerley made a step forward, only too anxious for an excuse to offer his assistance to the young beauty. But it was to Bayre she turned, as, apparently taking the offer of the one as the offer of them both, she said, in a bright girl’s voice, speaking in excellent English but with a slight French accent that was piquant and pretty,—

“Oh, thank you so much! If you would say, when the boat comes to the side, that I’ve forgotten something and shall be back directly?”

Bayre murmured his readiness, while Southerley expressed his vociferously. And with a smile and a pretty word of thanks she fled back over the ropes and the spars, the barrels and the fishing-nets, in the direction of the shops.

Southerley was put out that it should have been his companion who received the beauty’s commission. Bayre laughed at him and went to the side of the pier to watch the approaching boat.

It was now near enough for him to discern the face of the hard-featured, elderly man who pulled the oars; and as he looked, as he marked the long, straight chin, the straight upper lip, and the rather long grey hair which showed under the man’s peaked cap, he recognised a certain likeness to his own family, and more especially to his late father, which convinced him that he was in the presence of his uncle, Bartlett Bayre.

With a face full of interest he hung over the side of the pier, watching the boat and its rugged-looking occupant in his oilskins until the old man was only a few feet from the stone wall of the pier.

Then, leaning over, he hailed him with a smile.

“Ho! Do you know me, Uncle Bartlett?”

The man stopped on his oars, looked up quickly, and stared at the young man with the watery blue eyes of age.

Bartlett Bayre was still smiling, still holding his hand out in sign of amity and goodwill. To his surprise, almost to his consternation, there came over the older man’s face, as he looked upwards, an expression of horror and alarm impossible to mistake. His weather-beaten face grew livid, and the pipe, a common clay, suddenly fell from his lips as if it had been bitten in two.

For the space of a few seconds he sat rigid, as if petrified with dismay. The next moment he had turned the boat round with one rapid movement of his right oar, and was rowing out to sea with all his might.

CHAPTER III.
SOMEBODY’S IDEAL

“Uncanny sort of man your uncle!”

Bayre started and looked round. It was Repton who was speaking; he had come up and joined his friends while Bayre was busy with the man in the boat.

“Who says it’s my uncle at all?” said Bayre, sharply.

“Why, you do. You addressed him by that affectionate appellation, though I admit he was not responsive to the appeal.”

Bayre stood up, angry and mortified.

“I made a mistake, of course,” said he. “Being full of this unknown uncle, I was quite ready to take for him the first man who seemed to answer to the description given of him.”

“Then why, if he wasn’t your uncle,” persisted Repton, inquisitively, “did he seem so much put out by your speaking to him? In fact, he seemed more than put out, he looked horror-struck.”

“He took me for a lunatic, I suppose,” said Bayre, uneasily.

“I don’t see why he should. After all, even if you had been a lunatic he could scarcely be afraid of you while he was in the boat and you on the pier!”

“Of course not,” put in Southerley, who had been watching and listening very attentively. “The old man’s Bayre’s uncle sure enough. Why, there’s no mistaking the likeness between them, for one thing. He’s got your long, straight, sharp chin, Bayre, and there’s something indefinable besides, which I take for a family likeness. No, the fact’s plain; he’s your uncle, but he’s in no hurry to acknowledge the relationship.”

“Then,” retorted Bayre, recovering his temper as he perceived a weapon for retaliation to his hand, “if he’s my uncle, the lady who was with him is, of course, the young wife we’ve heard about.”

Both he and Repton burst out laughing on seeing how Southerley’s face fell at the suggestion.

“Rubbish!” he said angrily. “She’s a girl, not a married woman. I’ll take my oath she’s not more than eighteen or nineteen. Besides—besides,” he began to stammer in his agitation, “she—she wore no wedding-ring!”

“Are you sure?”

“Q-q-quite sure. I—I should have noticed it. I noticed everything about her.”

“Then you wasted your time,” said Repton, mischievously, “for what attention she gave to either of you was distinctly given to Bayre. That points again to the man in the boat being his uncle; the lady recognised the type.”

“I don’t know what you can have seen to be so jolly cock-sure as to what she noticed,” remarked Southerley, in a tone of displeasure, “for you were not in sight when she was on the pier.”

“Not in your sight, because your eyes were so precious full of somebody else,” retorted Repton, cheerfully. “But you were in sight of me, anyhow. I was behind that boat.”

And he nodded in the direction of one of the small fishing-boats which had been hauled up on the shore close to the pier, so that the bows, protruding over the stone-work, had afforded a very good hiding-place.

“You must have had very good eyes to discern this intense admiration for Bayre in the lady!” said Southerley, growing loud in his scorn.

“Keep your hair on, Southerley,” said Bayre. “He’s only chaffing you. You can’t suppose the lady felt any more spontaneous admiration for my charms than I did for hers. So you needn’t waste good jealousy upon me which might be useful some other time. She looked at me, if she looked at all, because I looked at her. And I only looked because I wondered what on earth you could find to rave about in a restless, fidgety, excitable-looking girl, who looked as if she couldn’t stand still for two minutes. Depend upon it she’s hysterical, and that she’s the sort of girl to talk your head off: the kind of woman who would get on your nerves after the first ten minutes.”

“Hysterical! She’s no more hysterical than you are!” cried Southerley, in tones less subdued than ever. “You call her hysterical just because she isn’t stodgy, and you prefer stodgy women, like the ass you are!”

Excited by their argument, neither of the three young men had observed that the fair subject of their discussion had come back while it was in progress, and was now standing only a few feet away, where every word they uttered reached her ears with perfect distinctness. It was, of course, Repton, the non-talker, who caught sight of her first; and as, with a glance of horror, he seized Southerley by the arm, she tripped demurely forward, saying, as she came,—

“Stodgy or hysterical, gentlemen, she will be glad if you will let her pass.”

The consternation of the three culprits, especially of the two disputants, was terrible to witness. Southerley’s reddish, open-air complexion became a beautiful beet-root colour, while Bayre’s darker skin assumed a sallow tint which was most unbecoming. At the same time they muttered confused and incoherent apologies, most pitiful to listen to; and Repton, who felt the comparative security of his own position, was the only one in a fit state to offer some intelligible words. Perhaps, however, they were not very well chosen.

“I assure you—believe me, we—that is to say they—were not talking of you, madam,” he said earnestly, stimulated in his zeal for his friends by the delight of knowing that he was the only one of the three sufficiently innocent to address her. For though Southerley had indeed defended her charms, he felt that he had not done it in quite the right way, or in the subdued and refined accents befitting such a theme.

Luckily for them all, the attention of the lady, who received all these apologies with an airy and gracious good-humour but little soothing to their vanity, was speedily distracted by her discovery that the boat with the old man in it was not waiting for her, as she had expected, at the landing-place.

She looked about her with consternation. Southerley sprang to the rescue.

“The er—er—boat— The er—er—er gentleman has gone away—is over there,” said he, pointing to the speck which the two weather-beaten sails of the little boat had now become in the distance.

The young lady looked from the boat to the young men in surprise.

“Why, what have you done? Is it you who have frightened him away?” she asked.

“Not I. If it’s anybody, it’s—it’s Bayre,” said Southerley, bringing out the name with some emphasis, as he indicated his dark-faced companion.

He was prepared for the look which instantly appeared on her face as she repeated to herself the one word, “Bayre!”

And into her eyes there came a strange expression, not the horror which they had seen in the face of the old man in the boat, but a look of interest, of wonder.

Southerley, who knew how to manage a boat—on the Thames, at least—went on eagerly,—

“Will you let me take you out to him? I can hire a boat here, and I know how to manage one. Ask my friends here.”

But the girl smiled and shook her head. Even Bayre acknowledged to himself that she looked very handsome when she smiled, for her teeth were white and even, and the curve of her lips over them was pretty.

“I won’t trouble you to do that, thank you. For that matter, I can manage a boat myself. We all learn to do that when we live on the small islands here.”

All the young men noted this speech, and poor Southerley’s countenance fell again. For it did look as if this beautiful creature must be old Mr Bayre’s young wife: Southerley’s soul revolted at the thought. He persisted in pressing his services. If she would not trust herself with him, at least it would be something if he could show off his prowess before her admiring eyes.

“Then let me go after him,” said he, “and tell him that you’re waiting, tell him to come back.”

She shook her head with a little hesitation.

“I can’t think why he’s gone,” she murmured uneasily.

And then, as if involuntarily, she threw a sidelong look at Bayre.

Southerley seized the occasion of her hesitation, and hailing a boatman, who was busy with a line in a small craft on the water below, he hastily made his bargain; and dispensing, after some argument, with the services of the owner, hoisted the lug sail and started in pursuit of the man with the pipe and the peaked cap. The pretty girl in the fisher cap looked the least little bit disconcerted on perceiving that the broad-shouldered young stranger with the red face and the deep voice was as good as his word. Instead of the admiration with which poor Southerley flattered himself that she was regarding his efforts, she watched him hoist the sail, and, with a slight frown of distress, said, in a low voice,—

“Why did he do it? He’ll be drowned to a certainty! It’s very dangerous to go out here without knowing something of the currents.”

“Oh, he can swim,” said Bayre, with indifference.

And Southerley’s other friend added gallantly,—

“I’m sure he wouldn’t mind being drowned while he was doing you a service, mademoiselle.”

“But he isn’t!” said she, slowly, turning upon Repton a pair of wide-open brown eyes. “If you knew old Mr Bayre”—and again she glanced at the young man of that name—“you’d know that it is no service to anybody to try to persuade him to do anything he doesn’t want to do.”

His wife, to a certainty! thought Repton, cynically.

But Bayre took a different view.

“Surely your father will come back for you?” he suggested.

The girl answered promptly,—

“Oh, he’s not my father—he’s no relation—at least—”

And there, tantalisingly, she stopped.

For no reason in particular, certainly no reason they could have given in words, both the young men felt relieved.

“I—I beg your pardon,” said Repton. “I might have known you wouldn’t have a father like that.”

Again the girl glanced, rather apprehensively, if rather mischievously, at the other man.

“If I’m not mistaken,” said she, slowly, “he is a relation of yours.”

Then she paused a moment, and seeing a sort of acknowledgment on the young man’s face, she added abruptly,—

“Are you his nephew?”

“I—I believe so.”

She looked at him with a little inclination of the head at this confirmation of the idea she had had about him.

“I thought so,” said she. “You are the son of Mr Richard Bayre, old Mr Bartlett Bayre’s brother, and your portrait, taken when you were a little boy, standing beside your father, is at the château in one of the salons.”

Bayre was at once keenly on the alert.

“Does he—do you happen to know—if my uncle ever speaks of me, madam?” he asked with vivid interest.

“Never,” said she.

And she answered with a look which gave both Bayre and Repton the impression that the old man had a decidedly hostile feeling towards his almost unknown young kinsman.

The uncomfortable feeling created by this impression was strongly increased when, after a short silence, the young girl said abruptly,—

“Are you going back to England soon?”

“Y-y-yes. We have to be back in London in a fortnight,” said Bayre, with a blank look.

“You live in London?” A look of reflection came into her eyes. “Everybody in England seems to live in London!”

“Yes.”

Then Repton, rather troubled that the beautiful girl addressed herself solely to his companion, put in,—

“You know London, of course, mademoiselle?”

There came a sudden flash of something, of eagerness, of longing, of some feeling, vivid but indescribable, into her face as she said simply,—

“I wish I did!”

“It’s an awfully jolly place,” went on Repton, insinuating himself jubilantly into the conversation which Bayre appeared glad to drop out of. “Lots of life, and movement, and bustle, and social enjoyment. And then there’s art—divine art!” and Repton made enthusiastic circles in the air with his right hand, “and the theatres!”

“Ah!—yes!”

It was a sort of sigh that the girl uttered, not looking at him, but vaguely out at the sea with the steady yearning of eyes that see more than the physical objects before them.

Then Bayre put in,—

“London’s a beastly hole, full of fog and smoke and mud, and hurrying people, and jostling ambitions that are never satisfied. As for social enjoyment, it’s a fallacy. People know you there, not as yourself, but as only a tiny part of London and its life. Real friendship, real social enjoyment, real art you get only outside.”

She looked at him with interest.

“I wonder!” she said softly. Then she added, in even a lower tone, “Still, one would like to try!”

Both the young men were silent, interested, too, in the bubbling vitality that wanted some outlet, in the vague, girlish unrest that “wanted to know.”

“In short, if you’re to believe Bayre, London’s a humbug,” said Repton. “But to us artists life and art are everywhere.”

“Are you an artist?” she asked with frank interest. “With a studio, a real studio, where you work?”

Repton smiled at the manner of the question.

“I don’t know about being a real artist,” he said, with a sudden affectation of modesty, “but I have a real studio in Horton Street, Tottenham Court Road, where I paint pictures.”

“That must be nice.” And then, with that persistent interest in Bayre which seemed to his companion so offensive and unnecessary, she turned to him and said, “And are you an artist too?”

“I don’t know,” said he, rather blankly. “If I am, I’m an unsuccessful one. And my medium is not paint and brushes, but pen and ink.”

“Oh, a writer? That’s nice too!”

“It would be nicer,” said he, drily, “if the medium could be print.”

“That will come! That will come! You are not very old.” Then, after an instant’s pause, during which she seemed to be gathering up some lost impressions, she said suddenly, “But I must be thinking of getting back!”

“Won’t you wait for—for the boat?” stammered Repton.

She had already moved a few paces away, but she paused, and said, smiling,—

“Oh, no, I can’t. You will thank your friend for me. I’m sorry he should have taken that trouble.” She turned away, bowing as she did so, but suddenly changed her mind and came back to them. There was a strange thoughtfulness and gravity in her face and manner as she repeated a former question,—

“And you are going back to England—London—soon? In a fortnight?”

Wondering and disconcerted, they both assented. She looked down for a moment, and then raised her head abruptly.

“Would you take a parcel to England—not for me, but to oblige one of my friends?”

“Certainly, of course we would.”

“Only too delighted—”

She cut them short with a smile.

“Thank you, thank you very much. You are very kind. I shall see you again before you go away, then.”

With more smiles, with more bows, she had fled away over the ropes and among the old barrels, and the two young men were left staring at each other, with the excitement of the unusual adventure still upon them.

“By Jove, what a lovely girl!” said Repton, enthusiastically.

“H’m! Lovely girl at asking questions; but we didn’t get much out of her in return,” said his companion, grumpily.

“Well, we couldn’t sit down and put her through her catechism. It was enough for me just to be in the presence of such a handsome creature.”

“Ah!” grumbled Bayre.

“But not for you, you Grimmgriffenhoof?”

“No. I don’t like her.”

But to judge from the way in which he looked at the boat which presently came gliding along under the pier, with two boatmen managing the sails and the pretty girl herself holding the tiller, Bayre’s dislike of her was at least as absorbing an emotion as the frank adoration of his two friends.

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.”

The mis-rule of three

THE
MIS-RULE OF THREE

CONTENTS