It was a matter of necessity with Mrs. Ogilvie to purchase a new dress
for the wedding. Wherefore, in the week following the night of the
ball, she went to London for the day, while builders and carpenters
were already at work repairing the ruined tower.
'It will be inconvenient,' she said, 'to go up and see my dressmaker
later when the house is full. Is it absolutely incumbent upon me, as
the mother of the bridegroom, to dress in grey satin, or have I
sufficiently scandalized my neighbours all my life to be able to wear
what I like?'
Usually her maid accompanied her when Mrs. Ogilvie went up to London;
but, in her wilful way, she had decided to-day that maids were useless,
and that her present maid had round eyes that stared at her from the
opposite side of the carriage when they travelled together. In short,
Mrs. Ogilvie intended to go to London alone.
She departed with some sort of idea of enjoying the expedition; the
purchase of clothes was a real aesthetic pleasure to her, and even the
feel of the pavements in the world-forsaken London of September had
something friendly about it that spoke to her with an intimacy and a
kindliness such as she never experienced among country sights and
sounds. A morning at Paquin's revived her as sea breezes revive other
women. Lunch followed in a room pleasantly shaded from the sun and
decorated with a fair amount of taste. But the food was uneatable, of
course; Mrs. Ogilvie could never get a thing to eat that she liked.
It was nearly four o'clock before the brougham which had met her at the
station in the morning drew up before a door in deserted Harley Street.
An elderly man-servant showed her into the doctor's waiting-room, and
Mrs. Ogilvie sat down and began turning over with interest the pages of
a fashion magazine.
'I think I know the worst,' she said to the famous surgeon whom she had
come to consult, when he led her into his room. 'What I want to know
is, can you put off this tiresome business until after my son's
wedding?'
He asked her quietly her reason for the delay. Few people argued with
Mrs. Ogilvie; there was an inflexibility about her which made protest
impossible. He knew that the case was a hopeless one, but life might
certainly be prolonged if she would submit to treatment without delay.
'Why should you put it off?' he said; 'even five or six weeks may make
an enormous difference.'
'I always put off disagreeable things,' said Mrs. Ogilvie lightly.
A London doctor probably knows many cases of delicate and sensitive
women who will fret over a crumpled rose-leaf and die with the calm
courage of a martyr; but the woman who would deliberately throw away
her chances of life was unfamiliar to the famous specialist. He looked
keenly at his patient for a moment out of his deep eyes.
'I have never known a case of this sort in which there was not an
immediate effort at concealment,' he said to himself; 'and women
conceal most of their sicknesses as if they were crimes.' Aloud he
asked her what was the earliest date at which she could put herself
into his hands.
'It is a great bore coming at all,' said Mrs. Ogilvie, with that sort
of superb impertinence which distinguished her and was hardly ever
offensive; 'but let us say in a month's time. The wedding was not to
have been till late in November; but my son and Miss Erskine are quite
absurdly in love with each other, and it will not be difficult to
persuade them to alter that date for an earlier one.'
'If you have positively decided to postpone treatment,' said the
surgeon, 'I can say nothing more except to tell you that you are
minimizing your chances of recovery.'
'I don't feel in the least like dying yet,' she said.
'Were you to put yourself into my hands at once,' he urged, 'it is
possible that you might be sufficiently recovered to go to the wedding
in November.'
'No one is to know anything about it,' said Mrs. Ogilvie quickly and
decisively. 'If my son is married in October I can come up to town, as
I always do in November, and go into one of your nursing-homes.
Probably the wall-papers will offend me, but at least I shall not have
the whole of a countryside discussing my helplessness and the various
stages of my illness. Ye gods! they would like to ask for details from
one's very footman at the hall door!'
It was useless to say more. The surgeon recommended diet, and made out
a prescription.
'Everything is talked about in these days, I admit,' he said, 'and I
think no one regrets the decline of reserve more than we doctors do;
but you are carrying a desire for concealment too far.'
Mrs. Ogilvie was drawing on her gloves and buttoning them with an air
much more grave and intent than she had bestowed upon her doctor during
the discussion of her health. 'Even an animal,' she said lightly, 'is
allowed to creep away into the denseness of a thicket and nurse its
wounds unseen; but we superior human beings are like the beggars who
expose a mutilated arm to the pitiful, and would fain show their wounds
to every passer-by.'
'Perhaps you will allow me to write to your son?' said the surgeon.
Mrs. Ogilvie replied by a quick and unequivocal answer in the negative;
then, relaxing a little, she said more lightly, but with intent, 'I
have always triumphed over difficulties all my life--I have always
overcome.'
'That is quite possible,' said the physician gravely.
Mrs. Ogilvie stood up and began to arrange her veil before the mirror
which hung above the mantel-piece; and, as she did so, she glanced
critically at her face under her large, fashionable-looking hat, with
its bizarre trimmings.
'I am very plain,' she said, with a sort of sensuous enjoyment in her
frankness, 'and yet I have passed successfully for a beautiful woman
most of my life. I am also what is ridiculously called a power in
society, and I owe everything to my own will. I detest unsuccess!'
'You are talking of the success which lies in the hands of every clever
woman,' said the doctor, 'but your health is another matter.'
'I believe in my good luck; it has never failed me,' said Mrs. Ogilvie,
as she shook hands and said good-bye.
When she reached home she dressed in one of her sumptuous gowns, for a
score of country neighbours were coming to meet Jane Erskine as the
fiancée of her son. Her maid bore the brunt of my lady's sarcasm
during the time of dressing, and was given a curt notice of dismissal
before the toilet was complete. The woman's big round eyes, which were
so obnoxious to her mistress, filled with tears as she accepted her
discharge. And Mrs. Ogilvie, descending the broad staircase of the
house with her air of magnificence, her jewels, and her red hair,
rapped her fan suddenly and sharply on the palm of her hand, so that
the delicate tortoise-shell sticks were broken. 'Why does she look at
me like that?' she said fiercely below her breath. 'I am glad I
dismissed her, and I am glad she cried! Why should not some one else
suffer as well as I?'
'You are not really tiresome, Jane,' she said after dinner, as the two
sat together on a couch. 'I have never known another engaged young
lady whom I did not avoid; but you are distressing yourself quite
unnecessarily about me. When I look tired, for instance, you may take
it as a sure sign that I am bored; nothing ever really makes me feel
ill except dullness.'
'Still,' urged Jane, 'Peter and I want it so much. We think if you
were to get advice from a doctor it would make us feel so much happier
about you.'
'I never allow any one to discuss my health with me,' said Mrs. Ogilvie
coldly; 'it is only a polite way of pointing out to one that one is
looking plain.'
Jane took one of her hands in hers with an impulsive gesture, and
printed a kiss upon it.
'Do sit upon me when I begin to bore you or to say the wrong thing! I
believe, for a woman, I am quite unpardonably clumsy and tactless.'
'Have you ever discovered,' said Mrs. Ogilvie, 'that tact is becoming a
little overdone, and that it generally succeeds in accentuating a
difficult situation, or in making it impossible? Women are horribly
tactful as a rule, and that is why men's society is preferable to
theirs. If you tread on a man's foot he will no doubt forgive you,
while admitting that the blow was painful; but a woman smiles and tries
to look as though she really enjoyed it.'
'Promise never to endure me in silence,' said Jane, laughing, 'even
when I am most tactless!'
'Silent endurance is hardly my character,' said Mrs. Ogilvie, screwing
up her eyes. 'I dismissed Forder before dinner because she annoyed me.'
'Please take Forder to your heart again tomorrow morning,' said Jane;
'she keeps Martin in such a good temper.'
'No,' said Mrs. Ogilvie; 'I shall get a new maid when I go up to London
in November. Forder has had round eyes for such a long time, and she
is hopelessly stupid about doing my hair.'
Mrs. Ogilvie always spoke about her hair with a touch of defiance in
her voice. It was so undisguisedly auburn that probably only Jane
Erskine and Peter ever believed that it was not dyed.
'What were we talking about?' she said presently. 'Oh yes, I was
saying that you were not tiresome although you are engaged to be
married. You are not even quite uninteresting, although you are
healthy and happy! All the same, I am going to try and persuade you
and Peter to have the wedding sooner than you intended.'
'Why?' said Jane simply.
'I am sick of Bowshott,' said Mrs. Ogilvie lightly. 'By the by, I
believe I am going to make it over to you and Peter when you marry.
Why should I act as custodian to a lot of grimy pictures, which don't
amuse me the least bit in the world, or walk in these formal gardens,
where I don't even meet a gardener after ten o'clock? A prison life
would really be a pleasant change! I shall go to London when you are
married; it is the only place--except Paris--where one lives. I must
have the house in Berkeley Square painted. And, oh! there are heaps of
things I want to do; must I really go into them all?
'When is the wedding to be?' asked old Lord Sherard, sinking on to the
sofa beside Miss Erskine, when he and the other gentlemen returned from
the dining-room.
'Jane and I have just been deciding that the wedding is to take place
in the middle of October,' replied Mrs. Ogilvie in her cool, decisive
voice.
Jane laughed and caught Peter's eye, and he drew her aside when he
could, and asked for further confirmation of a change of plans of which
he thoroughly approved.
There was no reason for delay; the building and repairing of the tower
would hardly interfere with the other parts of the vast house. Jane,
like Peter, was quite satisfied that their wedding should be at an
earlier date than was at first suggested. They had known each other
all their lives; why postpone the happy time when they should be
married?
So wedding invitations were written and despatched, and wedding gowns
were ordered, and wedding presents came in. Tenants presented silver
bowls and trays, and servants gave clocks and illuminated addresses,
and the Ogilvie family lawyer came down with his clerk to stay, and was
hidden away somewhere in the big house, where he wrote busily all day,
and made wills and transferred deeds, and wanted signatures for this
thing and for that through half the autumn mornings.
'I see nothing for it,' said Jane, 'but to postpone getting my
trousseau until after I am married. If I succeed in getting a wedding
dress and something to go away in by the twenty-sixth, I shall consider
myself lucky!'
Miss Abingdon, to whose Early Victorian mind a wedding was still an
occasion for tears, sighed over her niece's engagement because Jane
never came to her room at night to water her couch with tears, nor had
doubts or presentiments or misgivings.
'She seems to have so little sense of responsibility,' she sighed to
Mrs. Wrottesley, whose visits at this trying time were a cause of
nothing but comfort to her.
'I know,' said Mrs. Wrottesley--in the hesitating manner of the woman
who might have been 'advanced' had she not married a clergyman--'I know
it may seem to you irreverent to say so, but I sometimes think that
marriage is not undertaken lightly and unadvisedly enough. It seems to
me that nowadays the tendency is to consider the matter almost too
seriously, and that a certain light-hearted impulse is really what is
required before taking what is called the plunge.'
Miss Abingdon--not by any means for the first time--felt regret that
Canon Wrottesley's influence upon his wife had not made her a more
orthodox thinker. A woman who criticized the Prayer Book was surely
not fitted to be the wife of a clergyman. Miss Abingdon liked to lean
on a spiritual guide, and she thought that this was the graceful and
becoming attitude for all women.
'I am afraid we must not tamper with the Prayer Book,' she said
reprovingly; and Mrs. Wrottesley, who for twenty years had been silent
under reproof, relapsed into silence again.
Jane, meanwhile, was saying good-bye to every tenant on Miss Abingdon's
small estate. To her hunters she confided the good news that they were
going with her when she married, and that they would hunt with her as
before. And the stable cat, whom she took up in her arms and kissed
affectionately, was told that he really must not mind saying good-bye,
for that she, Jane, would only be two miles off, so that the stable cat
needn't look quite so disconsolate. The proverbial old nurse in the
village had to be visited, and the school-children asked to tea, and
tenants and gardeners to dinner; and every one was in a highly nervous
state of preparation, and in a still more delightful state of
anticipation.
Miss Abingdon enjoyed the dear fussiness of the wedding preparations,
and thought in her secret heart that Mrs. Ogilvie missed all the
pleasure of the thing by giving a few brief, emphatic orders to her
steward, instead of personally superintending every detail of the
servants' ball and the tenants' dinner.
Mrs. Ogilvie's directions were probably made in less than an hour, and
transmitted to Mr. Miller's capacious pocket-book when he came to her
boudoir to receive instructions one autumn morning. When he had left,
Mrs. Ogilvie quitted her writing-table, by which she had been sitting,
and walked to the window of her room and stood idly by it, her graceful
figure outlined against the pane. Before her stretched the great
gardens in an aching formality of borders and devices. Viewed from a
height, and with her near-sighted eyes, they presented an appearance of
a piece of elaborate stitchwork on a green worsted ground. The
fountains, with their punctual fall of spray, might have been a device
in shells and beads in the centre of each design. Beyond the gardens
there was a mass of woods, all dim greens and bright golds; but even
the woods were touched with formality, and the foresters of the place
had lopped away every unsightly branch from the beeches and oaks.
Probably there may have been homely corners in the gardens and grounds
which Peter had discovered as a child; but Mrs. Ogilvie, when she
walked, kept to the prim paths of the terrace and the garden, where
every pebble seemed to have its proper place, in full view of the
windows of the house.
'It has always been a prison to me--always,' she murmured to herself,
oblivious of the fact that no one more than she would have missed a
luxurious environment and a stately setting to her own personality.
Mrs. Ogilvie often imagined that she would have liked a small house;
but there is no doubt that she would have quitted it in disgust the
first time that the odour of dinner came up the back stairs. She
believed that a large staff of servants was merely a burden; but she
would have felt at a loss had she been obliged to wait on herself even
for an hour. As she looked now at the gardens in front of her, and
away to the woods beyond, and to the great stretches of greenhouses and
conservatories to southward, she thought how irksome they were, how
unnecessary, and how little pleasure they gave.
'Magnificence is always dull,' she thought, 'and yet people are
impressed by it! They not only value themselves by what they have;
they actually value others according to their possessions, and respect
a man for his ownership of things of which they cannot even hope to rob
him.'
She supposed that the tenants and servants would have to be fed on the
occasion of a marriage. She believed it was their one idea of enjoying
themselves; but she begged her steward not to bother her with details
when he had gone into the question of roasting an ox whole. Having
dismissed him with a few brief orders Mrs. Ogilvie went to her
writing-table. 'I may as well get over all the disagreeable and odious
things in one morning,' she said to herself.
Her writing-table was placed against a wall on which hung a mirror, and
she sat down opposite it. According to a custom she had, she directed
the envelopes first, before beginning to write her letters. Her
writing-table was always littered with addressed envelopes of notes
which she meant to write some day when she felt in the mood for writing.
She paused now when she had written the words: 'To be given to my son
at my death;' and, screwing up her face into her twisted smile, she
said to herself, 'How absurd and melodramatic it sounds!' Then she
took a sheet of notepaper and began to write. The first few lines
flowed easily enough, and then Mrs. Ogilvie's pen traced the letters
more slowly on the page. Once she paused altogether, and said aloud to
her image in the mirror opposite her escritoire, 'What a fool I am!'
and then stooped again over her task. The sprawling writing had hardly
covered half a sheet of notepaper when the red-gold head with its crown
of plaits was raised again, and the woman in the mirror looked at her
with a face that was suddenly livid. Her lips were white and were
drawn back somewhat from her teeth; and Mrs. Ogilvie, in the midst of
pain, recognized first of all how hideous she looked.
The pen dropped from her fingers, and she pushed her chair back from
the writing-table and went over to the fireplace and lay down on the
sofa. The day was cold, and Mrs. Ogilvie shivered and drew a cover
over her feet. 'When this is over,' she thought, 'I will ring and have
the fire lighted.'
She looked at the clock on the mantelpiece and calculated deliberately
how long the paroxysm would probably last. She had always regarded
pain as an animate thing which had to be fought with, and she had never
failed in courage when she met it, nor moaned when, as now for the
first time, she was beaten by it. The clock seemed to tick more
leisurely to-day, and the time passed very slowly; there is a
loneliness about suffering which makes the hours drag heavily. Once
she buried her face for a moment in the sofa cushions, and her bands
clenched the cover and crumpled the delicate satin between her fingers.
Her head sank lower, like a wounded bird that ruffles up the dust; she
moved convulsively amongst the cushions. It was a grim fight with pain
that she was making; she did not give in easily, but the odds were
unequal. Mrs. Ogilvie was in the hands of an unsparing foe. She was
conquered, but afterwards, when she lay quite still, there was a look
of defiance in her attitude.
Her maid, coming in and finding her sleeping, glanced at the blinds and
wondered if she dared lower them, for the sun was shining brilliantly
into the room now, and its beams were resting full and strong on the
figure on the sofa.
It was something about the position of the auburn head--something
twisted and unnatural in the attitude of the recumbent form--that
caused the woman to cry out suddenly and sharply, with a vibrating cry
that seemed to set everything in the room jingling. No one heard her
at first, and she opened the window and called aloud for help; for
there was a sound of horses' hoofs upon the gravel, and Peter rode up
with Jane to the door.
'Mrs. Ogilvie must have been dead an hour,' the village doctor said
when he came; and then he sent the weeping girl and poor, white-faced,
broken-hearted Peter out of the room. Neither of them could believe
the horrible news; they turned to each other, taking hands, as children
do in their grief, and Jane went back and with a sob stooped down and
imprinted a long kiss on the dead woman's brow.
'She must have died just as she was writing her morning letters,' said
Peter, as he glanced at the writing-table with its litter of notes and
papers.
'Perhaps it would be as well to lock up anything that is lying about,'
said the doctor; 'it is customary to do so. Or your lawyer--who, I
understand, is in the house--could come in, I suppose, and put away
jewels, etc.' He handed Peter the litter of notes and papers on the
writing-table.
'Thank you,' said Peter. 'I don't suppose there is anything very
important, but I will look through them presently.' He glanced at the
topmost addresses of the notes, and decided that they were probably
belated wedding invitations to people who had been forgotten, and he
put an indiarubber band about them and thrust them into his pocket.
The guests in the house departed hurriedly within two hours of Mrs.
Ogilvie's death, amidst all the confusion of hasty packing, and
carriages ordered for this person and for that, and footmen hastening
downstairs with luggage, and luncheon prepared hurriedly and eaten
almost surreptitiously by those who wished to catch an early train.
There was a horrible stir in the house under the hush and awe that
death brings. No one wished to intrude upon Peter; yet a dozen friends
wanted to see him, to hear, if possible, more details of his mother's
sudden end. Others, with a sort of animal instinct of forsaking at
once the place where death reigned, betrayed an almost contemptible
haste in quitting the house; but they, too, must know all that could be
told. They had never noticed that Mrs. Ogilvie did not seem well, or
they had remarked that of late she had spent much time in her room, or
'she had seemed so bright and cheerful'; and, again, 'they had noticed
how tired she had been at night sometimes.'
To no one had Peter any special news to give. Some one had heard, he
believed, that she had been to see Sir Edward Croft, the great surgeon
in London, and to-day they had telegraphed to him. Peter himself had
not really been anxious about his mother, although he had imagined for
some time past that she did not look well. He gave what attention he
could to his guests, bade them a conventional good-bye, and displayed
that reserve which an Englishman is supposed to be able to maintain in
times of sorrow. But it is not too much to say that, warm-hearted,
deeply affectionate man that he was, his grief for his mother's death
had something bewildering in it. He had loved her faithfully and
admired her loyally during the whole of his life; there had never been
a quarrel between them, and, if he had not received many outward marks
of affection from her, there was no single occasion in his life that he
could remember in which she had failed him. He had come first always;
he realized this with the sinking of heart which even the most dutiful
son may feel when he sees with absolute clearness, perhaps for the
first time, that he must have accepted, almost unknowingly, many
sacrifices from his mother. He hoped, with a boyish remorse and a
boyish simple-heartedness, that she understood everything now, and that
somewhere, not very far off, she would be able to see into his heart
and know positively how much he had loved her. He had always accepted
in simple faithfulness the statement that those who were gone 'knew
now,' as the phrase runs; and it comforted him to think that all he
might have said to her when she was alive was clearly understood by his
mother at last.
By two o'clock the big house was empty of guests and given over to
silence, or to the sound of hushed footsteps about the stairs, or to
the weeping of maids as they assembled in little groups in the
corridors and spoke with sobs of the mistress whom they had served
faithfully. Each room that had lately given up its tenant showed a
disordered interior, with paper strewn here and there. Or some maid
left behind to pack her mistress's heavier luggage could be seen
kneeling before open trunks and deftly arranging their contents.
A grey-haired butler approached his master when the last of the
carriages had driven away, and begged him to eat some luncheon, and
informed him that Miss Erskine was still in the library.
'Send something there,' said Peter briefly.
For a moment Jane could only weep, and they clung to each other,
saying, with the helplessness of the suddenly bereaved, 'Isn't it
awful?' Then, as they began to grow calmer, Peter administered what
comfort he could, and tried in his kindly way to induce the girl to eat
something.
'You must eat, you know,' he said, 'and it will do you good. It has
been a terrible time for you. And then I think you ought to go back
and lie down for a bit.'
If it is true that a woman suggests beef-tea as a universal panacea for
all ills, it is certain, on the other hand, that a man believes that a
woman always feels better for lying down.
'I should like to wait,' Jane said, 'until Sir Edward arrives, and to
hear what he has to say.'
A footman came in to clear away lunch, and then the two lovers went and
sat together on the library sofa, and looked out on the long stretches
of gardens with their cold precision and want of sympathy. A
luggage-cart, piled high with dress-baskets and portmanteaux, passed
down the drive towards the station gates, and a motor-car returned from
a neighbouring house for something that had been forgotten. After that
there was silence both within and without the house; even the maids had
gone downstairs to sit together and whisper. It was one of those grey
days in early autumn which have an almost weird sense of stillness
about them. Hardly a leaf stirred, and even the flight of the birds
was noiseless and touched with the universal feeling of hush. The
begonias and dahlias and flaming autumn flowers in the broad border
below the southern terrace wall had lost half their colour in the grey
afternoon, and a robin alighted softly on the window-sill and, putting
his head on one side, looked into the library at the pair sitting on
the sofa.
Neither had spoken for a time. To-morrow there would probably be
lawyers to see and the funeral to arrange for, and a hundred things to
do; but to-day there was a lull in which time itself seemed to have
stood still. Years had passed since this morning, and yet the clocks
marked only a few hours on their dials. Mrs. Ogilvie had died at
twelve o'clock, and the very flowers which she had placed by her table
still bloomed freshly, and a book she had been reading lay open where
she had left it.
Yet it seemed a lifetime since she had died.
During the interminable afternoon, and in the stillness of the big
library, with its ordered rows of books and solemn-looking, carved
cupboards, Peter and Jane Erskine sat together feeling oppressively
this great lapse of time that had passed. Their understanding of one
another had always been a strong bond between them; and now they felt
not like the lovers of yesterday, but like those whose lives have been
linked for years, and for whom loyalty and faith have grown deeper and
stronger as troubles and storms came. They looked across to the ruined
tower, where not very long ago, as we count time, they had told their
love to each other; and, so looking, had drawn closer by their common
sorrow. It seemed to them, in the hush of the library, that this time
of grief and dependence had something arresting in it. Life had not
demanded very much of them so far. To-day there was a strange sense
that its demands, perhaps even for them, would not always be small.
The doctor and the lawyer summoned Peter presently, and afterwards he
and Jane were told particulars of Mrs. Ogilvie's fatal illness.
'But she must have suffered--she must have suffered so!' said Jane,
with all the resentfulness that youth feels towards pain. 'Why did she
tell none of us? Why did none of us know?'
'I ought to have guessed something,' said Peter miserably. 'I must
have been a fool not to see that something was wrong.' And together
they wondered what would have happened if this had been done or that,
and were inclined to reproach themselves for much in which they were in
no measure to blame. They walked back through the dim, still woods;
and at the white gates of Jane's pleasant home Peter left her, and she
went on alone to meet Miss Abingdon.
It was late that night before the two sorrowful women went to bed; and
hardly was breakfast over in the morning before, with the restlessness
born of recent grief, Miss Abingdon was seeking anxiously to know what
she could do or what ought to be done.
'If,' she said, 'I 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.