Fyne interrupted me by stating again earnestly, as though it were
something not easy to believe, that his wife and himself had tried to
befriend the girl in every way--indeed they had! I did not doubt him for
a moment, of course, but my wonder at this was more rational. At that
hour of the morning, you mustn't forget, I knew nothing as yet of Mrs.
Fyne's contact (it was hardly more) with de Barral's wife and child
during their exile at the Priory, in the culminating days of that man's
fame.
Fyne who had come over, it was clear, solely to talk to me on that
subject, gave me the first hint of this initial, merely out of doors,
connection. "The girl was quite a child then," he continued. "Later on
she was removed out of Mrs. Fyne's reach in charge of a governess--a very
unsatisfactory person," he explained. His wife had then--h'm--met him;
and on her marriage she lost sight of the child completely. But after
the birth of Polly (Polly was the third Fyne girl) she did not get on
very well, and went to Brighton for some months to recover her
strength--and there, one day in the street, the child (she wore her hair
down her back still) recognized her outside a shop and rushed, actually
rushed, into Mrs. Fyne's arms. Rather touching this. And so,
disregarding the cold impertinence of that . . . h'm . . . governess, his
wife naturally responded.
He was solemnly fragmentary. I broke in with the observation that it
must have been before the crash.
Fyne nodded with deepened gravity, stating in his bass tone-"Just before," and indulged himself with a weighty period of solemn
silence.
De Barral, he resumed suddenly, was not coming to Brighton for week-ends
regularly, then. Must have been conscious already of the approaching
disaster. Mrs. Fyne avoided being drawn into making his acquaintance,
and this suited the views of the governess person, very jealous of any
outside influence. But in any case it would not have been an easy
matter. Extraordinary, stiff-backed, thin figure all in black, the
observed of all, while walking hand-in-hand with the girl; apparently
shy, but--and here Fyne came very near showing something like
insight--probably nursing under a diffident manner a considerable amount
of secret arrogance. Mrs. Fyne pitied Flora de Barral's fate long before
the catastrophe. Most unfortunate guidance. Very unsatisfactory
surroundings. The girl was known in the streets, was stared at in public
places as if she had been a sort of princess, but she was kept with a
very ominous consistency, from making any acquaintances--though of course
there were many people no doubt who would have been more than willing
to--h'm--make themselves agreeable to Miss de Barral. But this did not
enter into the plans of the governess, an intriguing person hatching a
most sinister plot under her severe air of distant, fashionable
exclusiveness. Good little Fyne's eyes bulged with solemn horror as he
revealed to me, in agitated speech, his wife's more than suspicions, at
the time, of that, Mrs., Mrs. What's her name's perfidious conduct. She
actually seemed to have--Mrs. Fyne asserted--formed a plot already to
marry eventually her charge to an impecunious relation of her own--a
young man with furtive eyes and something impudent in his manner, whom
that woman called her nephew, and whom she was always having down to stay
with her.