“Ah, monsieur, I regret that Monsieur Bayre cannot receive you—cannot receive anybody. He is ill—ill in bed,” said she.
“Will you take him my card? And I should like to scribble a few words on it first.”
He had taken out his pocket-book and found a card before he perceived that Marie Vazon had deftly and without noise put the chain on the door. Too indignant to say another word, he gave up the intention of writing anything on the card, and merely passing it to the girl through the narrow opening that was left, he went away.
What did this mean?
If he had not remembered that it was his uncle himself who had given the first intimation of his unwillingness to meet him, Bayre would now have suspected that the Vazons, for some reason of their own, wished to prevent the coming together of their master and himself. But with his two attempts to speak to his uncle, and his previous repulsion from the very house fresh in his mind, the young man could scarcely entertain this idea.
What then could be the motive for this marvellous eccentricity? He had never heard, from any of the inhabitants of the islands, a hint that his uncle was other than perfectly sane, or he might have ascribed this shyness to a caprice of insanity.
On the contrary, although all were agreed that his two recent misfortunes, the loss of his wife and the death of his cousin, had had a great effect upon him, yet everybody spoke highly of the old man as a good neighbour and a generous benefactor. How could his nephew’s visit in the company of his two friends be looked upon as an intrusion which justified such persistent and aggressive snubs?—snubs which seemed inconsistent with the known character of the man, and which nothing in his nephew’s personal history could be held to justify.
So mysterious, so incomprehensible did his uncle’s whole conduct seem, that Bayre conquered his first impulse, which was to turn his back upon the house with all possible speed, and resolved instead to play the spy a little, not more in the interests of his own natural curiosity than in his intense desire to learn what had become of Miss Eden.
When he had reached the avenue, therefore, he slackened his steps, and getting through the thin hedge on the left without difficulty, approached the house once more, this time by way of the other side, where a thick plantation had been partly cleared for a smooth lawn which, now an undulating sheet of snow, stretched away from the house to the sheltering wood behind.
A curious building it was, this low-roofed, rambling mansion, which had evidently grown to its present dimensions from a most modest country villa. The original building it was that Bayre came to first, a white-washed pile of simplest architecture, the ground-floor windows of which were closed up with heavy shutters. Most desolate did they look, these long windows down to the ground, with the closed shutters behind them. Beyond these he came to a stone extension, with a row of windows narrow and high, at least ten feet from the ground. He looked up at them with interest. There were no shutters to these, but he could see that there were iron bars on the inner side.