“Well, I believe he did find me out on the day he came here with you,” she admitted. “Recognised me, I fancy, by the mark I have here on my forehead.” And she indicated with one of her lean fingers a mole that grew almost under the hair over her right temple. “I could pass well enough for my cousin with my cap on; but in a room it’s more difficult. Still, it didn’t much matter, for Monsieur Blaise didn’t dare to ‘give me away.’ ”
“And the Vazons knew you, of course?”
“Yes, the rogues! They knew it and made me pay for it. But after all, in spite of their threats, what good have they done themselves by their knowledge? I’ve no doubt they have tried to make capital out of the truth over in Guernsey; but who’d believe it?”
Bayre was amazed, almost to the point of admiration, at the old woman’s audacious cunning. As she said, the story was too inconceivable to be readily believed, especially after this lapse of time. She took a pride in her deception, and the silence which followed her speech was presently broken by herself with a quiet chuckle of pride at her own cleverness.
“Yes,” she said, nodding her head two or three times towards the fire, at which she was warming her thin yellow hands, “there was no fear of my being discovered by anybody about here when they had once got used to the sight of poor old Monsieur Bayre, so broken down with grief at the loss of his cousin and of his beautiful young wife”—and she looked round to throw a vixenish glance at Miss Merriman, who was sitting in a state of stupefaction beside Olwen on the sofa—“that he seemed ‘quite a different man!’ Ha, ha, ha!”
Bayre remembered his first impressions of the shambling figure which he had taken for that of his uncle, and he realised the improbability that anyone should descry feminine attributes in that creature with the large masculine features, the masculine walk, with the pipe between its teeth and the peaked cap drawn over its eyes.
The silence was broken by Olwen, who suddenly cried,—
“Then the woman shut up here, hidden away, the woman whose knitting-needles I used to hear, was—”
“Eliza Ford,” croaked the impostor with grim enjoyment. “I couldn’t give up my knitting, and I was not above certain little feminine vanities.” She suddenly burst into another grim laugh, and turning round to Olwen, said, “You saw something one day, didn’t you? You saw a hand covered with rings at the window of the old powdering-room. Well, that was mine. I used to vary the monotony of being a shabby old man by hunting about in the old wardrobes and decking myself out in what I found there and in the jewel-cases! Strange freak at my time of life, eh?”
And she suddenly turned upon them with an air and tone so masculine that Bayre found himself shivering at the uncanny sight and sound.