“I should have to. You forget, or you don’t understand. Although he hasn’t been very affectionate to me since I’ve been here—since his own troubles, that is to say—Mr Bayre has been a good and kind friend to me ever since my own father’s death. It is he who has paid for my education, too, so that the little my father left should be allowed to accumulate for me. Now you see why I feel an obligation to consult his wishes as far as possible, and why I feel that I did wrong in running away as I did.”
“Well, you had reason to be alarmed. You have reason still. It’s not safe for you to be in the same house with a madman.”
“You don’t know that he’s mad! I don’t know it!”
“Well, there’s something wrong about him, something that makes me very unwilling to leave you under the same roof with him. Yet it’s a delicate business too. For, after all, he’s my own relation; and even old Blaise felt a reluctance about speaking out in the case of a neighbour and friend.”
The two looked gravely into each other’s face.
“It’s full of difficulties,” she said with a sigh. “I feel that I’m pulled first in one direction and then in the other. Though I’ve never been able to be fond of my guardian, I feel I owe a duty to him. And believe me, I should never have run away, as you call it, if I hadn’t been seized with a sort of terror of what was going on, and felt that I must have time to think—to think by myself. And now, what has my thinking brought me to? Nowhere. I’ve had to come back in a sort of disgrace, and I feel that he looks upon me as a traitor.”
Bayre looked uneasy.
“If even one could trust the servants it wouldn’t be so bad,” said he. “But I loathe those Vazons, and the two other women about the place don’t look very intelligent.”
“They’re both in terror of my guardian, and abjectly servile to Marie Vazon,” explained Miss Eden.
“I wonder if they know anything?”