Peter and Jane - Sarah Macnaughtan (novels for students .TXT) 📗

felt that I could even be of use by going up to town and choosing the servants' mourning, I should feel that I was doing something.'

There were piles of patterns of black stuffs, which Miss Abingdon had telegraphed for on the previous evening, lying in neat bundles on the breakfast-table, and stamped with their several prices and the width of the materials. Such things have often kept a woman sane in the first despair of grief.

'How would it do?' she said, 'to have a little crape on the body and not on the skirt?'

Jane replied that she thought it would do very nicely.

Poor Jane! her eyes were big with weeping, and she had lain awake the greater part of the night mourning for her friend who was gone. Now, as she tried to give her attention to her aunt and to the vexed question of the propriety of crape on the body, she thought, with girlish ingenuousness, that she wanted Peter more than she had ever wanted him before, and that she could do nothing until she had seen him. And across her grief came one great flash of joy as she realized that in all her troubles and sorrows she would have him with her.

'There he is now,' said Miss Abingdon, 'coming up the drive! Jane, my dear, how awfully ill Peter looks. Oh, my dear, you should have told me how ill he looks!'

Jane went out to the hall door without speaking. 'What is wrong?' she said briefly. 'Come into my sitting-room, Peter, and tell me what is wrong.'

'I 'd rather be outside, if you don't mind,' said Peter, the primitive man strong in him again.

There had been a storm in the night, after the unusual stillness of the afternoon, accompanied by heavy rain. Now the sun shone fitfully, and the disordered gardens and lawns were strewn with branches and countless leaves which chased each other, bowling along on their edges and dancing in mad eddies and circles.

'Let's get out of sight of the house,' said Peter; and they went into the high-walled garden and sat down on one of Miss Abingdon's cheerful-looking white seats.

There were long borders of dripping, storm-dashed flowers in front of them, and mignonette run to seed, and dahlias filled with moisture to their brims. Some gardeners were busy tying up saplings which had been detached from their stakes, and the beech trees on the other side of the high walls of the garden tossed their branches together and sighed a little.

Peter waited for a minute or two until the gardeners had moved out of hearing, and then said abruptly and with difficulty: 'You know those papers that the doctor gave me yesterday?'

'Those notes and things which were on her writing-table?' Jane asked.

Peter nodded his head, and then with an effort began again—this time with an attempt at formality—'I 'm sorry to have to tell you that there is something in one of them that I shall have to speak to you about.'

'Something in one of your mother's notes?' asked Jane, her level eyes turned questioningly upon him.

'I 'm telling it all wrong,' said Peter distractedly, 'and making it worse for you.'

'Are you quite sure that you need tell me anything at all?' asked Jane, and she laid her hand in his.

'I am quite sure,' he said; and then a very surprising thing happened, for he put Jane's hand aside and stood up before her.

'I 'm not even going to take your hand,' he said, 'until I have told you all about it. You see, there was a letter addressed to me amongst those on her writing-table yesterday. I 've shown it to the lawyer, but neither he nor I can make anything of it. It is directed to me to be given to me at her death; but she must have died while she was writing it. It leaves off in the middle of a sentence.'

'I think,' said Jane slowly, 'that nothing matters in the whole world so long as we have each other.'

'Ah, my dear!' said Peter, and he sat down on the bench and took her hand again. 'I 'll show you the letter,' he said suddenly, and brought the sheet of notepaper out of his pocket.

'May I read it?' said Jane.

'Yes, if you will,' he replied.

Afterwards they could tell every word of the unfinished letter by heart; but at the first reading the words seemed merely to puzzle Jane Erskine, and conveyed very little sense to her.

'When you get this letter I shall be dead,' wrote the woman who had meant to live for many years, 'and before I die I think there is something which I had better tell you. I am not haunted by remorse nor indulging in a deathbed repentance, and I shall merely ask you not to hate me more than you can help when you have finished reading this letter. You must often have heard of your elder brother who died when I was in Spain, the year after your father's death. He did not die——'

'There must be something more,' said Jane. She turned the page this way and that, as though to read some writing not decipherable by other eyes.

'I 've looked everywhere,' said Peter; 'there 's nothing more. Besides, you see, she stops in the middle of a sheet of notepaper. Why should she have written anything else on another piece?'

They read the letter again together, scanning the words line by line.

'What can it mean?' she said at last.

'I have evidently got an elder brother,' said Peter briefly, 'to whom everything belongs. Most people remember that my mother took a curious antipathy to the other little chap when I was born. I can't make it out in any possible way—no one can, of course. But it seems pretty plain that no will can be proved, nor can I touch anything, until my brother is known to be either dead or alive.'

'What can we do?' said Jane. Their two hands were locked together, and the trouble was the trouble of both.

'I can go out to Spain, where he is supposed to have died,' said Peter, 'and make inquiries.'

'I want to ask you something,' said Jane, after a pause. 'Let us be married quietly, first of all, and then we can do everything together.'

'I 'm probably a pauper,' he said simply, 'without the right to a single stone of Bowshott. I went fully into my father's will with the lawyer last night, and he leaves nearly everything to the eldest son.'

'Dear Peter!' protested Jane, accepting Peter's statement, but brushing aside its purport.

They talked on far into the morning, at one time half distrusting the evidence of their eyes which read the letter, at another looking far into the future to try to pierce the veil of darkness that at present shrouded it. Then, for there were many things to do, the young man turned his face homeward again, and Jane sat on alone in the garden, looking with eyes that hardly were conscious of seeing what they rested on, while the wet branches of the beech trees rocked themselves together, and the tearful autumn sunshine flickered on the disordered beds of mignonette. She sat there until the stable clock struck one, then rose and went indoors. One important decision had been made. They would be married quietly on the day Mrs. Ogilvie had fixed for the wedding; and then together they would seek the brother who, if he were still alive, would be brother to them both.

But the Court of Chancery took that reasonable view of the case which, as it frequently happens, is directly opposed to the view-sentimental. The Court of Chancery, in fact, refused to sanction the marriage of a minor with a man without settled prospects, and one whose position in the world was not confirmed by the possession either of money or of lands. At the age of twenty-five Miss Erskine might do as she liked; until then the Court of Chancery decided that she should divide her time each year between her two guardians, with whom she had always lived. No protests were of any avail, and wise relations and friends were agreed in thinking that it was better to postpone the marriage, at least for a time.

The autumn passed miserably. Peter went to Juarez first of all, and proved to be substantially true what at first he had supposed might have been the disordered fancy of a sick woman's mind. There was no record of the death of Edward Ogilvie, nor did any entry in registers show the name of an English child in the year when he was supposed to have died. No little grave in the cemetery marked his resting-place. One fact, at least, seemed established, and that was that Peter's elder brother had not died in infancy at Juarez.

Not much more than this could be proved, and Peter returned home to find that for the present nothing was legally his. Pending inquiries Bowshott was closed. Those who were in ignorance of the real state of affairs talked glibly of enormous death-duties which had crippled, for a time, even the immense Ogilvie estates, and had rendered it necessary for Peter to shut up the house and live economically. The countryside, which called itself gay, met at many little parties and talked charitably of the woman who was gone, saying, with an unconscious sense of patronage, that they had always liked Mrs. Ogilvie in spite of her faults. Death, the great leveller, had brought their unapproachable neighbour nearer to them; they were not afraid of her now. It was strange to think that she was really less than one of themselves in the cold isolation and the pathetic impotence of the grave. They could hardly picture her yet as a powerless thing—the keen, narrowing eyes closed, the sharp-edged poniard of her speech for ever sheathed.

Meanwhile, papers were examined, and every box and chest which contained written matter was searched for a clue to the missing child. Peter was engaged in long consultations with detectives, and lawyers were running up goodly bills, and British Consuls were making investigations abroad. A whole train of inquiries was set in motion, and pens and tongues were busy. The powerful hand of the law stretched itself out in secret to this country and to that, only to be met with a baffling failure to hold or to discover anything. Money was spent lavishly, and great brains tried to solve the mystery; and Mrs. Ogilvie lay in her grave in a silence that could not be broken, her hand, which had traced the few lines on one sheet of notepaper, cold and still for ever.

CHAPTER VIII

When Peter came back from Spain he came to an empty house. The big reception rooms at Bowshott were swathed in brown holland and dust-sheets, pictures were covered and carpets rolled up, giving an air of desolation to the place. The flowers in the formal gardens had all been dug up, and the carefully tended designs—so like a stitchwork pattern—had lost their mosaic of colour, leaving merely a careful drawing of brown upon green. The banks of flowering exotics, which his mother had loved to have in her drawing-rooms, had been removed to the greenhouses and conservatories. The sight of the gardeners mowing, for the last time in the season, the hundred-year-old turf of the lawn conveyed a suggestion of regret with it; the old pony harnessed to the mowing machine stepped sedately and quietly in his boots on the close, fine grass. Everything about Bowshott looked stately and beautiful in the clean, sharp air of the morning, when Peter drove up to the entrance after a long night journey and ascended the flight of steps leading to the hall door.

His return to the inheritance which had been indisputably his since he was a little boy had a horrible feeling of unreality about it. Half a dozen times in the course of the morning he had