Mrs. Wrottesley remained at Hulworth until her patient was better, and
then the good-hearted canon joined her there for a few days and was
altogether charming to poor little Mrs. Avory, who liked him far better
than she liked his wife. Toffy went up to London to join Peter Ogilvie
and to take ship for Argentine, and Peter went to say good-bye to Jane
Erskine.
These two last-named, cheerful people were in a state of acute
unhappiness which each was doing his and her best to conceal. It
required some pluck to be perfectly even-spirited and to show good mettle
in those days. The world contained for them nothing but a sense of
parting and uncertainty, and a horrible feeling of disappointment. Their
lives were to be severed, perhaps for years, and over all the uncertainty
and the thought of separation hung the mystery of Mrs. Ogilvie's
half-finished message. The memory of her was clouded by the thought of
how much she had suffered, and the conviction intruded itself painfully
that, if they had but known more, something might have been done for her.
The burden of a secret lies in the sense of loneliness which it brings.
A unique experience, dissimilarity of thought or knowledge that is not
shared by others, makes a solitude with which no bodily isolation can be
compared. Only one person knew--only one person had ever known: that
seemed the intolerable thing to the two persons left behind to wonder
what the message could mean.
'I sometimes wish she had been a Catholic,' Peter once said. 'It might
have been some sort of comfort to her.'
Mrs. Ogilvie was a woman who could remain silent always, and perhaps it
was the supreme effort involved by breaking through a lifetime of reserve
that, in its added strain upon her heart, had caused her death.
The last few days that the lovers had together were spent in a very loyal
and affectionate endeavour to make each other as happy as possible. They
made no professions of love or confidence, nor ever dreamed of promising
to be true, because they never for a moment could admit the possibility
of being anything else; and they did not even promise to write to each
other, or to say their prayers at the same time every evening--the
difficulty of calculating the difference between Greenwich and local time
on a westward voyage put a stop to anything of that sort. Nor did they
talk of remembering each other as they looked at the stars; but they
spoke of the future and of all the good things it was going to bring, and
they even laughed sometimes over imaginary portraits of the brother whom
Peter was to seek, and they told each other ridiculous little tales of
what he would be like and what he would say and do.
One afternoon Jane gave Peter a gold cigarette case as a parting gift,
with his name scrawled in her big handwriting across it; while Peter
presented his fiancée with a very handsome diamond ring, and forgot
altogether that perhaps he could not pay for it, and went back and told
the jeweller so. The jeweller, having known Captain Ogilvie all his
life, and being aware that he had lately succeeded to an immense
property, thought the young man was joking, and said it did not matter in
the least.
Then came the day of parting--drizzly, wet, and depressing--just such a
day as people always seem to choose on which to leave England; there was
the usual routine of departure; the 'special' from Waterloo, the crowd at
the station, the plethora of bags, chairs, and hold-alls; the good-byes,
the children held up to the carriage-windows to wave hands, the 'last
looks,' and the tears stopped in their flow by anxiety about luggage and
missing bags. Then came Southampton, the embarkation, and a sort of
enforced cheerfulness and admiration of the ship. Those who had
journeyed down to see friends off adopted a congratulatory tone, as
though the fact of their having already travelled so far in safety was a
sort of assurance that there could be little to fear for the rest of the
voyage.
At last the ship began to move slowly away, and finally swung round and
got out of dock. It was just then that many of the voyagers wished that
they might have had a few minutes longer of that dismal scene in the
drizzling rain, of those dear hand-waving, smiling, or weeping figures on
shore. But the engines had started their solemn beats, the pilot was on
the bridge. The voyage had begun for good or ill, and the Lord watch
over all!
Nigel Christopherson, being a man of feeling, said to a Scot who leaned
over the rails with him, watching a group of female figures dressed in
black on the quay, 'These good-byes are rather beastly, ain't they?'
To which the Scot replied, 'They make no difference to me whatever;' and
the remark, Toffy thought, was an extraordinary check to any emotional
feeling.
Jane got her first letter from Peter dated at Vigo, which peaceful port,
with its rows of white houses built along the shore, and its green hill
with the ruined castle behind, is a haven where many sea-sick passengers
would be. They had had a bit of a tossing, Peter said, in the Bay, and
Toffy had been very seedy but was better. The captain was a very good
sort of fellow, and full of yarns; his cabin was profusely decorated with
foxes' masks and brushes, and a few of his admirers believed that when he
was at home he hunted. The unfeeling Scot, who had declined to
sympathize with Toffy's sensibility to partings, had turned out to be a
very interesting sort of man, and not unamusing. He helped to make the
evenings on deck pass rather pleasantly with his stories. If Mr. Dunbar,
as he was called, had not had such an amazing Scottish accent Peter would
have said that probably the stories were not true. It was a letter such
as a schoolboy might have written, but Jane treasured the ill-expressed
sentiments as maidens of a bygone age may have treasured their lovers'
shields; and although she left the letter lying about on her
dressing-table, after the manner of modern young women, it was none the
less the dearest possession of her life until the next one arrived.
Toffy sat up in his bunk with a horribly bad headache, and wrote a long
letter to Mrs. Avory, which he posted at Vigo; and he wrote another
letter, not nearly so long, but one which cost him much more time to
compose, and addressed it to Miss Kitty Sherard. And this he carefully
tore into little pieces one night when the decks were dark and there was
no moon overhead; and he watched the small white bits of paper, as they
floated away into the black depths of the water, and then he walked up
and down the deck until the small hours of the morning, when Peter--one
of whose worst qualities was that he always fussed over people he cared
about--appeared in pyjamas and overcoat, and asked him sternly if he was
trying to get another chill.
At Lisbon the intelligent Scot suggested to the two travellers that they
should join him in a trip ashore. The three had made friends in the
smoking-room, and Peter hailed Mr. Dunbar as a fellow-countryman, and
enjoyed his rugged accent and his amazing penetration. He abounded in
useful information about the country to which they were going, gave
statistics on all points, and teemed with information. He was an ardent
and indefatigable sightseer, and never visited a building without seeming
to investigate it. The most complicated currency of a foreign country
never disturbed him for an instant, and he would make little sums with
extraordinary rapidity on the edge of any bill that was given to him.
The difference of price, as stated in Spanish coinage, between a bottle
of claret and a whisky-and-soda, might have puzzled some people; but
Dunbar worked it out to a fraction in a second of time, and without a
moment's hesitation laid his own share of the expense on the
luncheon-table of the Braganza hotel. He spoke Spanish better than he
spoke English, though he thought he had got rid of his Scottish accent;
but he still said 'I mind' for 'I remember,' and differentiated in the
matter of pronouncing 'court' and 'caught.'
At St. Vincent Peter wrote home again, and felt a certain sense of
insecurity at leaving letters on the rocky island. It was four o'clock
in the morning when the ship got into port, and the sun was rising over
the hills eastward, while to the west the bare, rugged, mountainous land
was a solemn, chilly grey colour. The water was smooth and dark beneath
the hills, but nearer the ship it was touched by the clear pale light of
the rising sun. The hills rose jagged and sharp against the sky without
a scrap of verdure on them; but the kindly atmosphere turned those in the
distance to a soft and tender blue. It smoothed away the rugged lines
and effaced the cruel-looking scars that seamed their sides, and covered
them with a misty peace. It seemed to the young man as he looked at them
that things became easier when viewed from a distance. He had suffered
very deeply during the last few weeks, and with him had suffered the girl
whom he had loved and cared for always, and whom he would love and care
for until the end of his life. Looking back at the distant misty hills
on Cape Verde Island this voyage seemed to him, in spite of all its
horrible sense of separation, to be something of a lull in the midst of
quick-happening events. When first he left home he had been plagued with
thoughts which he had fought with almost savage fierceness, and he had
wrestled to expel them from his mind; but that there could be any mystery
in his mother's life had necessarily awakened endless questionings in his
mind.
Why, if this little brother of his had not died, had he disappeared? And
what was the reason for his disappearance? 'He did not die,' said the
half-finished letter which his mother's hand had traced; 'he did not
die.' Once, in the middle of the night, as he said the wearisome
sentence over to himself, a word had come suddenly before him in letters
of flame, and Peter had turned away from it with a cry. A child who had
been deprived of his life might be said in a sense not to have died, and
there was the word of six letters in front of him in the dark. He turned
on the electric light in his cabin, and for a moment he had half a mind
to go in next door and wake Toffy. The burden of the suggestion was too
horrible to bear alone. 'He did not die!' His mother's mental state
might not have been perfectly sound at the time of her husband's death;
and her preference for him, Peter, was a fact that had been remarked by
all who knew her. Had she begun to write a confession to her son, and
stopped short in the middle? 'Don't hate me too much,' the letter said.
Why should he hate her? He did not know.
In the morning he was able to put aside utterly the thought which had
tormented him, but he lived in dread of being beset by it at night-time
again. He began to fear going to bed, and would sit up talking to Toffy
till the small hours of the morning, or playing picquet with Dunbar. Men
began to say that he 'jawed' too much and would not let them go to bed,
little knowing how he used to try to prolong a conversation so that he
might not be left alone with a horrible fear always ready to pounce upon
him when night fell, and when only the thud of the engines playing some
maddening tune broke the silence.
He tried, with a baffling sense of impatience, to make his own memory
act, and to recall the days when he was not quite three years old. But
the thing was an impossibility, of course, and his brain refused to give
up a single picture of that time.
It was only when the ship had left St. Vincent that a certain amount of
peace came to establish itself in his heart, and the large and beautiful
consolation of the sea began to make itself felt. The weather was calm
and clear, and the monotonous slap and swish of the water against the
ship's side was in itself soothing. The company on board were all
strangers to him, and this helped to give him a feeling that he was
starting anew in life. Also he was on his way to do the best he could to
find his brother, if he were living, or to clear up the mystery of his
death, if he were dead. There was no horrid feeling of having failed to
do the best that was possible. He must find Edward Ogilvie, or discover
the grave where he lay; and after that it would be time enough to think
what would be the next thing to do.
When the ship steamed away from St. Vincent in the evening, and the
lighthouse on Bird Rock made a luminous point in the gathering darkness,
the sight of land and of the hills had done Peter good, and had restored
him to the normal and natural man again. He turned to look back at the
rugged island, with the one point of light high up in its lighthouse, and
he thought that it was like some lamp which a woman sets in the window to
guide her husband home. With that feeling came a deep sense of the love
and the confidence which he and Jane had in each other; he knew that she
would not fail him whether he were rich or poor, happy or unhappy, and
that seemed the only thing in the world worth knowing for certain.
After leaving St. Vincent the weather became intensely hot, the wind was
with the ship, and there was not a breath of air to be had. Dunbar never
felt the heat at all; he had not an ounce of spare flesh on his body, and
he always ate two chops and some curry for breakfast, because, he said,
if you were paying for a thing you might as well have it. He played in
bull tournaments, and had a habit, that was almost provoking, of doing
everything better than any one else. His sharp-featured face, long keen
nose, and eyes with an intelligent-looking pince-nez fixed in front of
them, seemed to speak of a sleepless vigilance.
Peter, having a very small amount of information on any subject at his
command, was impressed by Mr. Dunbar, and thought that he might make a
fortune if he used his talents on the music-hall stage or at a bureau for
the supply of general information. The man seemed able to answer any
question that might be put to him.
'That is an extraordinary chap,' he said to Toffy. 'I wonder if he would
be of any use to us in the way of finding out about my brother?' But
eventually he decided that nothing ought to be done until they should see
Sir John Falconer.
'We had rather a disappointment here,' he wrote from Rio, in one of his
unliterary letters, 'because the yellow fever is so bad that we are not
allowed to land. I don't suppose you have any idea how tiresome a day in
port is if one does not go ashore. The heat is really terrific, and
under the awnings it feels exactly like sitting in an oven.' In
conclusion Peter wished he was at home again, and thought Toffy seemed
rather down in his luck; and he remained Jane's ever-loving Peter.
'I will tell you a strange thing about Rio,' began Dunbar, as he walked
up and down the ship that evening. 'If you make your fortune there, you
always go back to England and say that by right you are a Castilian
noble.'
'It would be a very large fortune that would tempt me to live in this
beastly climate,' said Peter, who was in a grumbling mood.
'I believe,' said Toffy, 'that with luck one could make a lot of money in
Argentine. I have got a scheme in my head now, which, if it comes off,
should place me beyond the reach of want.'
Dunbar referred to the boom time, and gave an exhaustive statement of the
fortunes which had been made in that glorious epoch and had been lost
afterwards. 'I have known men without capital make a hundred thousand
pounds in a few years,' he said; 'and when they lost it you simply could
not find them.'
'People do seem to disappear in Argentine in a queer way,' said Peter
with intention, and with a glance at Toffy. 'I know we had a
gardener--one of the under-men--and he had a brother who disappeared
altogether out there, so our man went to find him, and he, also, was
never heard of again.'
'The reason for that is not very far to seek,' said Dunbar. 'The first
thing you do when you come to Argentine is to leave off writing
letters--at least if you are a camp man. You simply can't abide the
sight of pen and ink.'
'But there must be some means of tracing a man who gets lost,' said
Toffy. 'He can't disappear into space.'
'You'd wonder!' said the Scot laconically.
'Still, you know,' persisted Peter, 'if a man's alive at all, some one
must know his whereabouts.'
'Obsairve,' said Dunbar, 'it doesn't require much imagination for a man
to change his name as often as he likes; and I should like to know what
police supervision there is over the Italian settlers, for instance, in
some of the remoter estancias? Murderers are hardly ever caught out
here, and murders used to be as common as a fight in a pulperia. Every
man carries a knife, and if you go up-country you will find that half the
peons are nearly covered with scars; and if once in a way the knife goes
too deep it's just one of those things which cannot be helped, and the
less said about it the better. Again,' he went on, 'suppose a man is
murdered on his own estancia--a thing that used to be common enough--the
peons are all in league, and they generally have had a hand in it. Their
master has been giving them _carne flacca_ (lean meat) to eat, and that
is enough to upset the whole rickmatick of them.'
'I suppose they are not likely to turn on a revolution for our benefit,'
said Toffy, in a tone of disappointment.
'I haven't got the fighting instinct in me,' said Dunbar literally.
'Whenever there has been fighting where I have been, I have always sat
indoors until it was over.'
Peter, with a desire to lead the subject back to the case of men who
disappeared, turned in the deck-chair where he was sitting enjoying a
light breeze which had sprung up after dark, and said tentatively: 'I
can't quite understand, you know, a man disappearing altogether and
leaving no traces behind him.'
'I shall never,' said Dunbar, 'believe in the final disappearance or even
in the death of any one until I have seen the doctor's certificate or the
man's corpse. Men have got a queer way of turning up, and even the sea
may give up secrets when you least expect it. Take the case of the
_Rosana_,' he went on, 'and allow me to put the facts of the case before
you. The _Rosana_ was a ship that used to do good a bit of trading on
the coast, and there was a man on board of her whom I used to know, and
who had been once a little too well known in Argentine. Well, this ship
foundered with all hands on board, and was never heard of again, although
two of her life-belts were picked up, and one or two pieces of her
deck-gear.'
'Any ship might founder at sea,' said Peter, 'and not be heard of again.
Go on with your story, Dunbar.'
The electric lights on deck went out suddenly overhead, leaving only one
burning; the breeze blew soft and cool, and six bells sounded sharply and
emphatically in the quiet of the night.
'I wouldn't,' said Dunbar, 'give you the benefit of my speculations on
the subject of the _Rosana_ were it not that E. W. Smith was on board.
E. W. Smith couldn't die; he wasn't fit for it. But it's a long story.
I 'll not bother you with it.'
Dunbar looked doubtfully at his tobacco pouch, pinched it, and then
contemplated his pipe. Peter handed him a cigar-case, and Dunbar
accepted a cigar, and slipping it into an old envelope, he deposited it
in his pocket. 'I don't believe I should have time to smoke it through
now,' he said, and he continued filling his pipe.
'I suppose you come across a good many queer tales, travelling about as
much as you do,' said Toffy.
Dunbar nodded without speaking. 'You'd wonder,' he said at last. He
finished his pipe, knocked out its ashes, and put it into a little case
lined with red velvet, and stowed it in his pocket; he looked at his
watch and announced that there was still another half-hour before he
intended turning in.
'We might have the end of your story,' said Peter.
'A story is as good a way as any other of wiling away the evening, and
you are welcome to hear the rest of this one,' admitted Dunbar. He was a
grand talker, according to his compatriots, and he chiefly loved the
engineers' mess-room, where he could sit by a table covered in oil-cloth,
and sip a little weak whisky and water, and revert to his broadest Doric
in company with some engineers from the Clyde. 'The _Rosana_,' continued
Dunbar, clearing his throat, 'only carried one boat on her last journey.
I happen to know that for a fact, but the Lord only knows the reason for
it! Now, this boat was found, half-burnt, lying on a lonely bit of coast
a few weeks after the _Rosana_ foundered. This is a thing which I may
remark is not generally known; but I happen to have had ocular
demonstration of it. The boat was a smart built one, with her name in
gold leaf on the bows. Tranter was the captain of the _Rosana_, and he
liked to have things nice. Now, why should this boat have been found
half-burnt on the coast, but with a piece of her name in gold leaf still
partially visible?'
'The boat probably drifted ashore,' said Peter, as if he were answering a
question in a history class.
Dunbar hardly seemed to hear him, and went on with hardly a moment's
interruption. 'I am a student,' he said, 'of the deductive method of
reasoning, and I begin with the _a priori_ assumption that E. W. Smith
could not die. I should hold the same belief even if I believed in
Purgatory.' (Dunbar pronounced the word with an incalculable number of
r's in it, and it came from his throat like the rattle of musketry.)
'Presuming,' he went on, 'that the _Rosana_ foundered, was E. W. Smith
the man to go down in her, or was he not?'
'I suppose some of them took to the boat,' said Toffy. 'In an affair of
that sort it is a case of _sauve qui peut_.'
'The whole crew would have swamped the boat,' said Dunbar, who liked
giving small pieces of information at a time.
'Consequently----' said Peter.
'Consequently,' said Dunbar, 'I 'm just biding my time, and I 'll tell
you more when there 's more to tell.'
'It's a queer story!' said Peter.
'It's queerer than you think!' said Dunbar.
'You can't believe,' said the other, 'that this man Smith went off in the
boat by himself?'
'I don't,' said Dunbar, 'for E. W. Smith couldn't row, and with all his
sea-going he was a landsman to his finger-tips.'
'So then,' said Peter, 'he must have had accomplices, and accomplices
always tell tales.'
'There 's one very certain way of silencing men,' said the Scot.
Peter rose abruptly from his chair and threw his cigar end out over the
water. 'It's a beastly suggestion,' he said briefly. His face was
white, and he found himself hoping to God that this tale of Dunbar's
would not bring back to him those horrible nights he had had at the
beginning of the voyage.
'Tranter was the captain of the boat,' said Dunbar, 'and Tranter was
about the worst sort of coward you are likely to meet on this side of
Jordan. E. W. Smith, on the other hand, never lost his head.'
The story seemed finished, and Toffy got up and stretched himself lazily,
and said he was going to turn in; but Peter still sat where he was in his
deck-chair.
'There might be a hundred different endings to your tale, Dunbar,' he
said, 'each one as likely as the other. The boat, for instance, might
have capsized, with too many men crowded into her, and have drifted
ashore and been burned accidentally or otherwise by the people who found
her. Or the crew and captain of the _Rosana_ may never have taken to the
boat at all, and she may have foundered with all hands (as you say the
newspaper reports had it at the time); or the _Rosana_ may be sailing in
another part of the world with her villainous captain and E. W. Smith and
no end of swag on board. Or both men, again, may be sleeping very
peacefully at the bottom of the sea at this moment; that, after all,
seems to me the most likely ending to them. Of course,' he finished, 'I
don't know what grounds you may have for making another suggestion about
their probable fate.'
Dunbar looked at him keenly for a moment. 'I would not have made the
suggestion,' he said quietly, 'only, you see, since the wreck of the
_Rosana_ I have seen E. W. Smith or his ghost, and that is why I do not
believe in the final disappearance of a man till I have set eyes upon his
corpse.'