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

to check himself when he found his thoughts wandering to alterations or improvements, and to tell himself, with a bewildered feeling, that perhaps he had not a right to a flower in the garden or a chair in the house.

'I can't believe it's not mine,' he said aloud, as he drove up the long avenue from the station in his dog-cart, with one of the famous Bowshott hackneys in the shafts. 'I can't believe it's not mine!' Many people might have found in the singular unhomeliness of the big house a just cause for withholding their affection from it, but Peter had always loved it. Every corner of the place was full of memories to him. Here was the wall of the terrace off which, as a little boy, he used to jump, making horrible heelmarks in the turf where he alighted; and there was the stone summer-house, built after the fashion of a small Greek temple, but only interesting to Peter Ogilvie from the fact that he used to keep his wheelbarrow and garden tools there. He remembered the first day when it had suddenly struck him that the geometrically shaped flower-beds were designed after a pattern, and he had counted, with his nurse, the loops and circles in the design. There, again, were the fountains with their silver spray, in whose basins, by the inexorable but utterly unintelligible law of the nursery, he had never been allowed to play. Here was the clock on the tower which used to boom out every hour as it passed, but of whose strokes he was never conscious except when he heard it at night. Passing inside the house was the hall, with its big round tables by the fire, and beyond that was the library and his mother's drawing-room; while in the older wings of the house were the ballroom where Charles I. had banqueted, and the Sèvres sitting-room, so called from the china plaques let into the mantelpiece, where he had made love.

'I hope, if my brother is alive, that he is a good sort of chap,' said Peter.

He breakfasted in the tapestried room which he had ordered to be kept open for him, and then went into the library to write his letters. He had a hundred things to do. At lunch-time he interviewed his steward, his agent, his stud-groom, and the other heads of departments of a large estate. The horses were to be sold with the exception of a few favourites. The gardens were to be kept up as usual.

Some dogs of his mother's would be cared for, his bankers would pay the usual subscriptions to local charities, and the almshouses in the village were to be maintained as they had always been maintained.

After lunch Mr. Semple, the lawyer, arrived. He was a pleasant man and a keen botanist. The gardens at Bowshott were a delight to him, and Peter had often found him good company over a cigar in the evenings. Mr. Semple was one of those who had throughout urged secrecy and caution in the matter of the late Mrs. Ogilvie's communication. 'In the first place,' he said, 'it may still be proved to have been an hallucination of her mind, attendant upon her state of health; and, in the second place, anything like publicity might bring a host of aspirants and adventurers whose claims would take months of investigation to dispose of.' He advised that everything about the house should remain in its present state for a year, until a proper legal inquiry into the disappearance of the elder son could be instituted.

'He may have died as a child, although he wasn't buried at Juarez,' said Peter.

Jane had departed to spend her usual six months of the year with General Erskine, but she had written to say, positively, that she knew it would come all right; and whenever Peter was downhearted he always thought of her letter, believing, in all simplicity, that Jane was never wrong. If only she were at Miss Abingdon's now, instead of in her uncle's house in Grosvenor Place!

'She 'll miss the hunting, I 'm afraid,' he thought miserably, contrasting their present separation with all the joy and happiness that they had so fully intended should be theirs this winter.

Mr. Semple had a shrewdness acquired from many years' experience in legal matters, and he shook his head when Peter made the suggestion that probably his brother had died in infancy. 'The conclusion I have arrived at, after years of legal work,' he said, 'is that the undesirable person lives, while the useful or much wanted one dies. Those who encumber the ground remain longest upon it, and the person in receipt of a large annuity or pension is proverbially long-lived. However, we have so far not found a single trace of the existence of Edward Ogilvie, though you must remember we have not yet ascertained in which different parts of Spain your mother lived during those two years which she spent there.'

'I don't see who on earth is to tell us!' ejaculated Peter. 'She generally had foreign maids about her, and I think I always had French nurses. I never heard of any old servant who went with her on her travels; and although, of course, money was paid to her by her bank, and letters were forwarded to her by the bankers, the actual addresses to which they were sent have not been kept after an interval of twenty-five years. One of the old clerks at Coutts's remembers, in an indefinite sort of way, that he forwarded packages for a long time to Madrid, and afterwards, he thinks, to Toledo, and then farther south, and at one time to Cintra; but my mother's headquarters seem always to have been in Granada, and the clerk says that he can give me no dates nor indeed any exact information.'

'I did not know she had been at Cintra or Toledo,' said Mr. Semple thoughtfully.

'I won't swear that she had,' said Peter. 'The Peninsula wasn't so generally known twenty-five years ago as it is now. Travelling was difficult then, and people in England, who have not themselves travelled much, are very liable to get confused about the names of foreign places.'

'Still,' said the lawyer, 'Cintra and Toledo are places that every one knows.'

'You mean,' said Peter, 'that in a well-known place, with English people living in it, there would be more likelihood of getting the information which we want?'

'I mean,' said Mr. Semple, 'that, as there is no evidence of your brother ever having been seen at Juarez, the next thing is to find out in what place there is evidence of his appearance.'

It was late afternoon, and as all clerical work for the day was now finished, Peter suggested and Mr. Semple readily agreed to a walk in the gardens. There was nothing left in the flower-beds, but the conservatories and the orchid-house were a real feast of pleasure to the lawyer. He went into the outer hall to fetch his stick and coat, and then, turning back towards his host, he made a humorous signal to convey the intelligence that some callers had driven up to the door. Peter retreated precipitately; but Mr. Semple had already been seen and was hailed by Mr. Lawrence, who had, a few minutes before, drawn up to the entrance in his big red motor-car. Already Mr. Lawrence was in earnest conversation with the butler, and his feminine-like ejaculations could be heard now as he stood and conversed with the man at the hall door. He stood on the doorstep while his guests in the motor, who seemed to fear that they might be intrusive, looked as though they would prefer to hasten their departure.

'Ah, how-do-you-do, Mr. Semple,' said Mr. Lawrence in his high-pitched voice, advancing a few steps into the hall. 'It is a great piece of luck meeting you like this! I have just driven over with my friends, Sir John and Lady Falconer.—Lady Falconer, may I introduce my friend, Mr. Semple?—This is a very sad house to come to, Mr. Semple, is it not?' he said, and paused, hoping for a little gossip from the lawyer. 'I was just driving through the village, and I have been to see the church with my friends, and we thought we would run in and inquire how everything was going on.'

'Everything,' said the lawyer dryly, 'is going on as well as could be expected.'

'How is Peter?' said Mr. Lawrence, putting on an appropriate expression of woe, which sat oddly on his big healthy red face. He was a kindly man at heart, but an idle existence and his inveterate love of gossip had made a poor creature of him. His healthy muscular frame did not know the sensation of that honest fatigue which follows a good day's work, and his mind travelled on lines of so little resistance that he may be said to have exercised it almost as infrequently as he exercised his body.

Mr. Semple replied that Peter seemed well; and Mr. Lawrence, taking him in an affectionate and familiar manner by the sleeve of his coat, said: 'I should so much like my friends to see the gardens; Peter would not mind, would he?'

Lady Falconer, the least intrusive of women, who had heard the whispered colloquy, here interposed and said that, as she was very cold, she would much prefer to go home; and Sir John added with simple directness that he thought that, as the place was more or less shut up at present, the gardens had better wait for a more fitting occasion.

Mr. Lawrence protested that a walk would do Lady Falconer good, and that, further, as they were leaving so soon, there would be no other chance of seeing the famous gardens. In fact Mr. Lawrence had the door of his motor-car open, and was helping Lady Falconer to alight almost before he had obtained Mr. Semple's permission to make a tour of the grounds.

'It's all right,' he said, in his fussy, dictatorial way, divesting himself of his heavy motor-coat, and preparing to act as cicerone. 'This place is thrown open once a week to the public; and although this isn't a visitors' day all sorts of people come to visit Bowshott on the other days of the week.'

Lady Falconer felt slightly ruffled by the way in which her wishes had been ignored in a small matter, and confined herself to talking to the lawyer; but Mr. Lawrence overtook them on the pretext of pointing out some special beauty of the design of the gardens, or of the fine view that could be obtained from the high position of the terraces, and the next moment he had plunged somewhat ruthlessly into the absorbing topic of Mrs. Ogilvie's sudden death.

'We were all shocked by it,' he said, emphasizing his words in his gushing way; 'and of course to our little circle,' he said, turning to Mr. Semple in an explanatory manner, 'it is more particularly painful and distressing, because Sir John and Lady Falconer had only just renewed a very old acquaintance with the deceased lady.'

'We knew Mrs. Ogilvie very well in Spain,' said Lady Falconer in her charming voice, still confining her remarks to Mr. Semple.

'Ah!' said the lawyer, 'you knew her in Spain?'

'Yes,' said Lady Falconer, 'and it was one of those friendships which I believe it was intended on both sides should be renewed when we should return to England; for, on my own and on my husband's part, it was a matter of real liking. But we have been on foreign service ever since we were married, and I never met Mrs. Ogilvie again till she drove over to the races at Sedgwick.'

Mr. Semple detached himself and his companion from the little group which Mr. Lawrence was showing round with so much assiduity, and, as they paced the broad walks of the terrace together, he said to her, with an air of frank confidence, 'You were with her,