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

as another shot whizzed past them he yelled out suddenly, 'Lie down, Toffy! Get down into the bottom of the boat!'

And quite suddenly Toffy did as he was told.

Peter rowed then like two men, but the river ran more quickly now, and the shallows were more dangerous, and the steering was more difficult.

By Jove, how well Purvis knew the navigation of it! He had the tiller-ropes in his hands again. He made a feint to go under the bank as though to land, and then shot suddenly into midstream. The other boat followed in their wake. Purvis's knowledge of the currents was probably well known, and it was safe to follow his lead: the boat and the men in it were clear enough to see now.

But what in the name of Heaven was Purvis doing! It positively seemed as though he was trying to lose the little bit of way that they had gained in advance of the others, and for one moment a horrible sense of the man's unscrupulousness came over Peter Ogilvie, and he wondered even now, in the midst of the chase, whether it might not be that Purvis was playing them false.

'I 'll shoot him before he can sing out if he is!' thought Peter to himself as the boat was steered on to the very edge of a shallow again, and then made off into the middle of the stream. 'Look out what you are about!' he cried, seeing in the wake of the boat the uneven, circuitous route by which they had come. 'For God's sake steer straight if you can!'

And then he saw a smile on Purvis's face—the usual watery, mirthless smile, and the pale, wide-open blue eyes; and, looking back, Peter saw that the boat behind them was overturned in the stream, and that the men who had been in it were struggling to the bank, while the boat itself was being carried rapidly down with the current.

He eased his rowing then, and getting his breath he laughed out aloud. The spirit and excitement of the chase had been good, and it was successfully over.

'Look here, you can get up now, Toffy,' he said.

He turned round in his seat and shipped his oars with a jerk. 'You devil!' he said slowly; 'you must have seen him hit!'

He bent over the poor boy stretched out in the bottom of the boat and felt his heart and found that it still beat. He loosened his neckcloth and sprinkled water on his face, while the two other men fell to their oars again, and rowed the boat as the day dawned to the little Italian settlement. They carried Toffy into the house of the Argentine woman who burned candles to the Virgin and stuck French paper match-boxes round her shrine. They lifted him into the hut and laid him on the humble bed, and Peter dressed the wound as well as he knew how, while Hopwood in an agony hovered round them, and Ross was sending here and there to try to find a doctor.

No one knew what had become of Purvis, no one cared. Each was trying with all his might to save a life very dear to them which was slowly ebbing away.

The sun was up now, and the long hot day was beginning; but still Toffy had never spoken, and still Peter kneeled by his side on the mud floor of the hut, easing him as well as he could, giving him water to drink, or bathing his forehead. There was not much that he could do for him; but he felt that Toffy was conscious, and that he liked to have his old friend near him. He never altered his position as he kneeled, for his arm was under the dying man's head, and it seemed a more comfortable place for it than the poor Argentine woman's hard pillow.

Toffy lay with wide-open eyes, and there were great beads of perspiration on his forehead which Hopwood wiped away from time to time. He breathed with difficulty in short gasps, and still he never spoke. It came upon Peter with a horrible sinking of the heart that he might die before a doctor came, and without saying one word to him. All the compunction of a heart that was perhaps unusually womanly and tender was raging within him for not having taken better care of the boy. He wanted to say so much to Toffy, and to beg his forgiveness, and to ask if there was anything in the world he could do for him, and he hoped wildly and pitifully that he was not in pain. But the dying man's eyes were fixed on the bare walls of the hut and on the little shrine of the Virgin in the corner of the room, and it seemed now as if the mistiness of death were settling upon them, so that they saw nothing.

Ross went restlessly to and fro, now entering the room for a few minutes, and then going out again to scan the distant country to see if by any chance the camp doctor was coming.

When Toffy at last spoke he went and stood outside the hut, and an instinct caused him to bare his head for a moment.

Just at the end Toffy said something, and his voice sounded a great way off, and almost as though it came from another land. 'Is Kitty there?' he said.

'No; it is me, old man,' said Peter thickly.

He was holding the boy's head now, for his breathing was becoming more difficult, and he stooped and kissed him on the forehead. He felt the chill of it, and, startled, he called out, almost as one calls out a message to a friend departing on a journey, raising his voice a little, for Toffy already seemed a long way off, 'I never knew—I never knew, Toffy—that you had been hit, or I would have stopped.'

'I didn't want to spoil the race,' said Toffy. 'I don't often win a race,' he said, and with that he died.

CHAPTER XVI

They carried him home in the evening when the sun had set, and on the day following, according to the custom of the country, they buried him. Some peons dug the grave in a corner of the little estate, and sawed planks and made a railing round it, and Ross read the Burial Service over him from Toffy's own Prayer Book, and Peter kept the well-worn Bible for Kitty Sherard.

Peter sought solitude where he could. His grief was of the kind which can be borne only in solitude. The love of David and Jonathan had not been deeper than the affection he and his friend had had for one another. The small estancia house became intolerable, with its sense of void and the feeling that at any moment Toffy might appear, always with some new project in hand, always gravely hopeful about everything he undertook, always doing his best to risk his life in absurd ventures such as no one else would have attempted. It was only the other day that Peter had seen him trying to break a horse which even a gaucho felt shy of riding; and he loved to be in the thick of the mêlée attempting the difficult task of swinging a lasso above his head, with that air of imperturbable gravity always about him. Or Peter pictured him in the long chair, where during a feverish attack he had lain so often, ruffling up his hair and puzzling his head over problems of Hebrew theology. Every corner seemed to be full of him, and yet no one had ever appeared to have a less assertive personality than he, nor a lighter hold on his possessions. He thought of how he himself had always gone to Toffy's dressing-table to borrow anything he might require—the boy who was so much accustomed to have his things appropriated by other people! And then again he saw him in the big, ugly drawing-room at Hulworth, nursing one of his appalling colds, or looking with grave resentment at his priceless collection of vases in the glass cases in the hall. He remembered him riding in the steeplechase at Sedgwick, and quite suddenly he recollected how sick and faint Kitty Sherard had become when he fell at the last jump. He thought of a silver box Toffy had bought for her at Bahia, and he wondered how it was that he had been so blind as not to see how much these two had cared for each other. His feeling of loss amounted almost to an agony, and once when he had ridden alone far on to the camp he shouted his dead friend's name aloud many times, and felt baffled and disappointed when there was no response.

Good God! was it only two nights ago that he was picking out hymn-tunes with his finger on the piano! At dinner-time they had been teasing him about the Prophet Elijah, Toffy having calculated the exact distance that the old prophet must have run in front of Ahab's chariot. 'It was a fearful long sprint for an old man,' Toffy had said in a certain quaint way he had. And now Toffy lay in his long, narrow grave under the mimosa tree, and the world seemed to lack something which had formerly made it charitable and simple-hearted and even touched with beauty.

No one asked after Purvis, no one had seen him. He had disappeared in the mysterious way in which he usually came and went, but his little boy was still at the estancia, and his bitter crying for the friend who was dead had added to the unhappiness of the day. He was a child not easily given to tears, and his efforts at controlling his sobs were as pathetic as his weeping. Peter found him the morning after Toffy's death curled up behind some firewood in an outhouse, where he had gone so that his tears should not be seen. He comforted him as well as he knew how, and wished that Jane were there, and thought how well she could console the little fellow; and he said to himself with an upward stretch of his arms which relieved the ache of his heart for a moment, 'Oh, if women only knew how much a man wants them when he is down in his luck!' He thought that he could have told Jane everything and have talked to her about Toffy as to no one else, and he wished with all his heart that he could climb up there behind the stack of wood and give way to tears as this poor little chap had done. He wondered what they were to do with him suppose Purvis never came back again.

But Purvis came back. Men often said of him that he had a genius for doing the unlooked-for thing; but no one could have expected even of him that he would venture to a place so near to his own estate and to the men who had attempted his life. He travelled by night, of course. His cat-like eyes always seemed capable of seeing in the dark, and even his horse's footfalls had something soft and feline about them.

The other men were sleeping as men do after two long wakeful nights and a day of stress and exertion. Even grief could not keep away the feeling of exhaustion, and Purvis could hear their deep breathing in the corridor, when, having tethered his horse to a distant paraiso tree, he stole softly up to the door.

His boy's room was at the back of the house, and Purvis crept round to it, and called him softly by name. Dick's short life had been full of adventure and surprises, and he never uttered a sound when his father's light touch awakened him from sleep, and his voice told him softly to get up. Purvis dressed him with something of a woman's skill, and