Then, as the old man’s voice was heard again, she drew herself away and stole into the room, and the young man, staggering and feeling for the banisters, went slowly downstairs.
A minute later he was outside the house, walking at a rapid pace towards the Vazons’ cottage. Jean, who was in the grounds near the mansion, had caught sight of him, and came up with him, panting, before he reached his destination.
“They were a bad lot, the pair of them,” cried Jean, who was evidently highly delighted by the disappearance of father and daughter; “only for some reason or other there was no saying a word against them to old M. Bayre. Why, we could all have told him how Nini Portelet came over here one day when Marie had left monsieur’s child alone in the cottage, and how she took it over to St Luke’s with her. It was when you and your friends were over here, monsieur, that it happened. And Marie didn’t put herself out about it, but just borrowed the child of a St Luke’s fisherman, and got her money from old Monsieur Bayre as usual. Ah, they were a pair of beauties! She gave the child back to its mother yesterday, and I guessed somehow that they might be missing to-day. As a matter of fact, I know they crossed over to St Luke’s before it was light.”
Bayre entered the deserted cottage, where the disordered state of the living-room spoke of a sudden departure. Among the displaced articles of furniture, not good enough to be worth any attempt to take away, there were certain signs, cynically left without disguise, of the robbery committed at the château on the previous night.
There was a tablecloth, heavily and handsomely fringed, in which, without doubt, some of the booty had been hastily wrapped up by Marie. There were a few plated articles which had been inadvertently carried away with the silver. And there was the iron box about which so much fuss had been made.
Yes, lying bent and broken among the ashes on the hearth, after having evidently been forced open with a bent poker which lay near, was the very box which Marie had dropped out of the window to her father; and lying on the uneven tiles of the floor, at a little distance from it, was a heap of papers which Bayre at once judged to have been its contents.
He picked these up and began to examine them. To his astonishment and perplexity, the very first of these to attract his attention was one in which the words “my nephew and namesake Bartlett Bayre,” were the first to catch his eye.
Further inspection proved this to be a will made and signed by his uncle only nine months previously, and in it he found that he himself was not only left a legacy of ten thousand pounds, but was appointed guardian of the testator’s infant son and heir.
Bayre started to his feet, so much amazed at what he had read that for the moment he seemed scarcely able to think or even to see.
His uncle, only nine short months ago, had been so kindly disposed towards him that he had made him a handsome legacy! How then had it happened, unless indeed the old man’s mind had become unhinged, that he had shown his nephew, from the first sight of him, nothing but aversion of the strongest kind?