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.