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 then
he bade him remain where he was while he crept softly into the
drawing-room of the house.
He came back presently as noiselessly as he had left the room, and
whispered, 'I am looking for a tin box; is it anywhere about?'
'They opened it to-day, and took some papers out,' said Dick.
Purvis drew one short, quick breath.
'Then let us be off at once,' he said.
He crossed the room once more in his stealthy fashion, and took from
the mantelpiece a small bottle of nerve-tabloids which he had
forgotten, and slipped them into his pocket, and then went out into the
dark again. Once he paused at the entrance of the corridor and
listened attentively, and then crept down the garden path and found the
horses tethered to the paraiso trees. They led them softly through the
monte, and there Dick paused.
'I am going to say good-bye to him,' he said. 'I don't care what you
say!'
He went to the grave under the mimosa trees, and with a queer elfin
gesture he stooped down and kissed the lately disturbed sods, and made
the sign of the cross upon his narrow little chest as he had seen his
Spanish mother do. The dignity of the action, with its unconscious
touch of foreign grace, and the boy's pathetic attempt to keep back his
tears as he lingered by the grave in the darkness at an hour when any
other boy of his age would have been safely tucked up in bed, might
well touch the heart of any one who stood beside the child.
'I didn't know he was hit!' said Purvis suddenly; and probably he spoke
the truth for once in his life. Toffy was one of the few men who in
many years had trusted him, and he had been a good friend to Dick.
'Well, the game's up!' said Purvis. And he and his son mounted their
horses and rode off into the blackness of the night together.
Ross had rescued the black japanned box from the boat, and had kept it
under his care until such time as he should have an opportunity of
giving it to Peter. It was from a sense that it might provide some
sort of distraction to a man almost dazed with grief that he brought it
into the drawing-room on the evening of the day Toffy was buried, and
suggested that perhaps Peter had better open it and see what was in it.
The key was gone, of course, but they prised it open with some tools,
and on the top of the box there was a letter which made Peter lay his
hand over his pocket for a moment. It was as though by some magic the
packet which lay there had been transferred to the interior of a black
japanned box discovered upon a river steamer in the Argentine Republic.
The writing on the cover was a duplicate of the one he himself held,
and was addressed in his mother's writing: 'To my son, to be given to
him at my death.'
Peter could not see quite straight for a moment. The finding of the
packet seemed to establish conclusively his brother's identity; and he
took out the folded sheets which lay inside the cover with hands that
were not steady.
The very words in the opening sentences were the same as in his own
letter, and written in the clear, strong handwriting which he knew so
well.
'When you get this letter I shall be dead,' he read in the words which
were already painfully familiar to him; 'and before I die there is
something which I think I had better tell you. I am not haunted by
remorse nor indulging in death-bed 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 of your father's death. He did not die----' So far
Peter knew the letter off by heart, but there seemed to be many pages
of writing to follow. 'And as far as I am aware he may be living now.'
'If it is anything bad,' said Ross kindly, 'why not put it off until
to-morrow? You are about used up to-day, Peter, and whatever there is
in that box can wait.'
'I am all right, thanks,' said Peter, without looking up. And Ross
went out to the patio and left him alone.
'I must go a long way back to make myself intelligible,' the letter
went on. 'I suppose people of Spanish descent are generally credited
with an unforgiving spirit. I have never forgiven my sister-in-law. I
did not at first attempt revenge, possibly because there was only one
way in which I could deprive her and her children of their inheritance.
That way was denied me. My eldest boy died at his birth, and the girl
only lived a few weeks. After that I had no other children. I think
the grief this caused entered into both our lives with a bitterness
which is unusual, and which I shall not attempt to recall. I shall
only say that we both mourned it, and that Lionel Ogilvie and his wife
by their conduct made what might have been merely a sorrow a matter
also of almost unbearable disappointment. I mention this regrettable
emotional feeling in order to make my subsequent conduct intelligible
to you. In the course of years, during which your father hardly
attended to any matters concerning the property, because it would seem
to be benefiting his legal successors, I urged him to go abroad on an
exploring expedition such as he loved, hoping in some way to mitigate
his disappointment or keep him from dwelling upon it. I have probably
not conveyed to you how deep the quarrel was between him and his
brother; but if I have not done so it is not of any great importance.
'When your father had sailed for Central Africa I went out to Spain to
visit my property there, and I took a sea-voyage to Lisbon for the
benefit of my health. There was a young couple in the steerage of the
boat going out to settle in Argentine. They were people of the working
class and very poor, and before we reached Lisbon, on the night of a
storm, the woman gave birth to a child and died, and the father was
left to start life in an unknown country with a helpless infant
dependent upon him. Some kind-hearted people on board the steamer made
up a subscription for him, with the English people's quaint notion that
all grief can be assuaged with food or money; and one night when I was
on deck alone the stewardess brought me the baby to see.
'When we got into Lisbon the following day I offered the man to adopt
the child; and when my maid returned to England I got a Spanish woman
for him, and took him with me to my own estate. He was greeted
everywhere as my son, and allowing myself the luxury of the small
deception, I pretended to myself that he really was mine; but weeks
passed before I ever dreamed of deceiving anybody else on the subject.
It was a letter which my sister-in-law wrote to me which decided me to
stay out in Granada during my husband's two years' absence, and to
announce, in course of time, that I was the mother of a son. The plan
was quite stupidly easy, and everything lent itself to the deception.
The child was fair, and not unlike the Ogilvies, and his father had
given him up entirely to me, on the understanding that he was never to
claim him again. It may seem strange to you, but it is a fact that
after I returned to England there was not the vaguest suspicion in any
one's mind that he was not my own child. When my husband returned from
abroad I was convinced, if I had ever doubted it, that I had acted
wisely. Under the circumstances I should act in the same way again.
'Of course events proved that I had made a mistake; but I had in the
meantime made my husband perfectly happy and my sister-in-law perfectly
miserable, and that was what I desired.
'You were born a year after your father's return home, and when the
other child was three years old. To say that I then found myself in an
intolerable position would not be to overstate the case. If your
father had lived, my difficulties would have been greater than they
actually were, and it was during his lifetime and after your birth that
I suffered most. I suppose only a woman, and one, moreover, who has
longed for children, would be able to realize what my feelings were,
and I shall not urge your compassion by dwelling upon that time. I
have never accepted pity, and I should prefer not to have it bestowed
upon me when I am dead.
'It was only after your father's death that I saw a way of escape out
of the intolerable position in which I had placed myself. I was in
very bad health for a time, and my husband's affection for the alien
child was more than I was able to bear. There is always a touch of the
savage in motherhood, and I am naturally jealous.
'After my husband's death I went out to my own property in Spain, and
by judiciously moving about there from one place to another, and
changing my personal servants frequently, it was a comparatively easy
matter to say that the child had died, without exactly specifying where
his death had taken place.
'It was absolutely necessary that he should be got rid of. A pauper
emigrant's boy was taking the place of my son in everything. The very
tenants about the place treated him differently from the way in which
they treated you. My husband had decided that the bilk of his property
was to go to him; and all the time I knew that his father was from the
class from which perhaps, navvies are drawn, and that his mother was
some girl from Whitechapel or Mile End.
'He had to go, but I treated him fairly. I took him down to Lisbon
myself and sent him back to his father with a trustworthy couple who
were going out there. From my own private fortune I bestowed upon him
a sum sufficient to educate him and to place him in the world.
'I think I never breathed freely or had one undisturbed moment from the
time you were born until he had gone to Argentine.
'The people to whom I entrusted him both died of fever in Rosario, and
from that day to this I have never heard of the boy who was called
Edward Ogilvie. The money which I had bestowed upon him had proved too
tempting to some one. The child disappeared, and so far as I am
concerned he was never heard of again.
'For four years he had lived as my own son, and it was I who took him
away from his father and his natural surroundings. I want you to find
him if you can. If he has been brought up vilely or treated brutally
by strangers, the fault, of course, lies with me; this will probably
distress you, but I think it will be an incentive also to you to try to
find the man.'
The letter was signed in Mrs. Ogilvie's name and it finished as
abruptly as it had begun.
* * * * *
The first thing that roused Peter from the sense of bewilderment and
almost of stupor which beset him was Dunbar's arrival at the estancia.
'Purvis has given us the slip again!' said the detective. 'The man has
as many lives is he has names! He has disappeared more than once
before, and he has even died, to my certain knowledge, two or three
times, in order to get out of a tight place.'
'Oh, Purvis, yes!' said Peter absently; and then he pulled himself
together and briefly told Dunbar the whole story.
'It doesn't alter the fact,' said Dunbar, 'that I have got to find him
if I can.'
'No,' said Peter stupidly. 'No, I suppose it does not,' and he added,
in a heavy voice, 'I believe Toffy would like me to look after the boy.'
'The mystery to me is,' said Dunbar, 'how Purvis, as you call him (to
me, of course, he is E. W. Smith), could have got hold of this box of
papers. It may be a fraud yet,' he said truculently, 'and it will
require investigation.'
'I know my mother's writing,' said Peter, 'and Purvis was in the act of
trying to burn the box before we took him off the steamer. It is the
last thing in the world that it would suit him to have about him if he
meant to establish his claim to be the heir.'
'That's so,' said Dunbar thoughtfully.
'The box could not have come out with him when he sailed to Argentine
as a child,' said Peter, 'because the letter is dated long after that.'
'And you say you never saw the man until you met him out here?' Dunbar
went on.
He brought out a notebook from his pocket and began to jot down Peter's
replies.
'No,' said Peter, 'or, if I did, I can't recall where it was. At first
when I saw him he reminded me of some one whom I had met; but
afterwards, when it seemed pretty well established that he was my
brother, both Christopherson and I thought that this vague recollection
of the man, which I mentioned to him, might be based on the fact that
there was some sort of likeness between him and some members of my
family.'
Dunbar jotted this down also. 'And you positively have no recollection
of having seen him?' he said, as he fastened a band of elastic round
the book. 'If that is so he must have had accomplices in England who
stole the box for him. I shall have to find out where these boxes were
kept at your home, and, as nearly as possible, I must discover with
whom Purvis was in communication in England. Or he may have gone there
himself. I know that he went home in one of Lamport & Holt's boats
only a few months ago--that was after the wreck of the _Rosana_, you
understand--and it was while he was in England that I saw him, and knew
for certain that he had not gone down in the wreck. My warrant against
him is for a common hotel robbery. It was when he came back to
Argentine that he began this river-trading, which was in the hands of a
better man till he took it.'
'The plan will be for you and my lawyer to work together,' said Peter;
'but at present I can't furnish you with the smallest clue as to how
these papers came into his possession. I know the look of the box
quite well. There were several of them in my mother's writing-room,
which was in the oldest part of the house. They were all destroyed one
night last autumn when we had rather a serious fire there.'
Dunbar took out his notebook and began to write.
'_By Jove!_' exclaimed Peter, suddenly starting from his seat. He saw
it all in a flash: the burning tower, with volumes of smoke rising from
it; the line of men, with hose and buckets, pouring water on the
connecting bridge of the tower; the groups of frightened guests on the
terrace, and his mother standing unmoved amongst them in her sumptuous
purple dress and the diamonds in her hair; the arrival of the
fire-engine from Sedgwick; and then, just at the end, the figure of a
man appearing on the bridge, with a cloak wound round his head, dashing
into the doorway through which the smoke was issuing in great waves;
his sudden flight across the bridge again; and then Jane, at his elbow,
clasping his arm and saying, in a terrified tone, 'Oh, Peter! for a
moment I thought it was you!'
Dunbar was scribbling rapidly in his notebook. 'It is as clear as
mud!' he said at last. 'Purvis, after the _Rosana_ incident, was
missing for a considerable time, and it is believed that his English
wife at Rosario hid him somewhere. There he probably heard the story
of his adoption, and determined to prove himself the eldest son.'
'I don't understand how he could have heard the story,' said Peter.
'He heard most things. But there are links in the chain that we shall
never get a sight of; we see only the beginning and the end of it,'
replied Dunbar.
The Scot was very seldom excited; but he got up from his chair and
began to walk rapidly up and down the room, his under-lip stuck out,
and his tough hair thrown back from his forehead. 'The whole thing
depended upon his getting what direct information he could about the
property, and he must have worked this thing well. The fire, I take
it, was accidental?'
'Oh, the fire was accidental enough,' said Peter, 'and was found to be
due to some electric lighting which was put into the tower.'
'Purvis's visit to England must have been to ascertain if Mrs. Ogilvie
were still alive, and, in the first instance, he probably meant to levy
blackmail upon her; he must have discovered where she kept her papers,
and have tried to effect an entrance on the night of the ball when many
strangers were about.'
'I believe,' exclaimed Peter, 'we saw him in one of the corridors of
the house during the dance, and decided that he must be one of the
guests unknown to us, who had come with some country neighbour, and
that he had lost his way amongst the almost interminable passages of
the place.' He saw himself and Jane making for the leather-covered
door which led to the bridge, and the shrinking stranger, with his
hopelessly timid manner, who had drawn back at their approach; and he
thought he heard himself saying, 'Shall I get him some partners, or
leave the people who brought him to the dance to look after him?' It
was only a fleeting look that he had caught of the man's face, and he
recalled it with difficulty now, but it was not a far-fetched
conclusion to decide that the two were one and the same man.
Dunbar was in a sort of transport. 'It's the best case I ever had,' he
said, 'and we only want the man himself to make the thing complete!
Purvis has played some pretty clever and some pretty deep games in his
time; but this is about the coolest thing he ever tried to pull off,
and he has as nearly as possible won through with it.'
Mr. Dunbar always relapsed into a strong Scottish accent in moments of
excitement, and he became almost unintelligible at last, as he rolled
forth his r's and gave it as his opinion that the man was a worthless
scoundrel.
'I can't think,' said Peter, 'why Purvis did not claim the inheritance
sooner. He had the whole thing in his hands.'
'Yes; but Purvis did not know that!' exclaimed Dunbar. 'I 'll take my
oath he 's been pumping you about how much old servants knew, and the
like; and there are men working the case in England, judging by the
number of telegrams he has had. He would have been over in London
before many months were gone, or I am very much mistaken, and as soon
as the train was laid; but it would have been a fatal thing for him to
have attempted a case before he knew how much was known. Your arrival
in Argentine probably precipitated the very thing he was working for.'
'He remarkably nearly succeeded,' said Peter.
'There ought to be a training home for criminals,' Dunbar exclaimed,
'to teach them once and for all to destroy all evidence, rather than
retain that which incriminates alongside of that which may be useful.
A man will sometimes keep a bundle of letters which will bring him to
the gallows together with information which might make his fortune.'
Peter described how he had found the tin case on the top of a bundle of
shavings in the cabin of the river steamer. 'He was in a tight place
there, and must have known it,' said Peter. 'Why not have burned the
letters before our boat got up?'
Dunbar laughed. 'You can't very well make a holocaust on a small
steamer on a dark night without showing where you are, for one thing,'
he replied, 'nor can you overturn a paraffin lamp on the top of a
bundle of shavings without a possibility of burning yourself up at the
same time. There was a love of sensationalism, too, about the man. He
would like his steamer to flame away at the right moment, and
disappoint the men who meant to board her; or, what is still more
likely, there was a considerable amount of gunpowder on board the boat,
and a boarding-party arriving at the right moment would have been blown
sky-high.'
'He never showed mercy,' said Peter.
'The Lord will need to have mercy upon him if he gets into my hands,'
quoth Dunbar, 'for I have none to spare for him.'
'But I,' said Peter, 'have got to remember that my mother charges me to
befriend the man.'
'But then,' said Dunbar tersely, 'your mother never knew what sort of
man you would have to deal with.'
'God knows!' said Peter.
'Well, it's a hanging matter if we get him,' said Dunbar cheerfully.
He and the commissario had their orders, and they would be obliged to
execute them. The results must be left for a court of justice to
decide.
They rode away the following morning, and there seemed nothing for it
but to wait at the estancia until more news was forthcoming. For Peter
the days were the saddest of his life, and left an impression upon him
which nothing ever quite removed afterwards. He became older suddenly,
and a certain boyishness, which was characteristic of him, was gone and
never returned again. Life, which had once seemed so simple to him and
so easily lived, so full of pleasures and of good times and of good
comrades, had suddenly become complex and filled with difficulties, and
made up of grave decisions and shadowed by a sorrow which would
probably be felt as long as he lived. Ross would not let him stay
indoors, and mercifully gave him a double share of work to do. The
weather was cooler now, and the days could be filled with outdoor
occupation from morning till night. There were no siestas in the
afternoon or lazy dawdling over afternoon coffee in the heat of the day
to remind him of long gossips with Toffy, and the evenings were shorter
and not so difficult to fill.
'I 'm an awful bore, Ross!' said Peter, having sat silent from
dinner-time until he went to bed one night; 'but I can't help it.'
'I know you can't,' said Ross kindly.
The big man, who was a poor player of cards at the best of times,
became seized with a desire to learn picquet, and, strange as his
method of consolation may have been, Peter knew what the good fellow
meant by it, and taught him the game and got through the time somehow.
There was still no news of Purvis; the man seemed to have vanished in
his own mysterious way, and nothing could be heard of him. It was
ascertained that he was well supplied with money, and it was thought
that, as his child would be incapable of any very long journeys or
unusual hardships, the discovery of his whereabouts near home might
lead to the discovery of the father. But the thing remained a mystery.
Dunbar's long lean frame grew leaner than ever as he searched and
journeyed and telegraphed without obtaining any results.
It was the boy who appeared first, and then without his father.
Perhaps Purvis discovered that escape would be easier without the
burden of the child, or it may have been that his queer affection for
him had determined him to seek safety for the boy somewhere. But it
was part of the man's extraordinary coolness that he should send him
for Peter Ogilvie to look after.
The boy arrived at the estancia one night, a poor, tired little object,
with a letter from his father in his pocket. The two had made their
way as far as the province of Salta, and from there the boy had been
sent to Taco, where, unaided, he had found a horse and had ridden over
to the estancia. He was thin and weak-looking, and had evidently
suffered a good deal from his many journeyings. Ross took him and
looked after him, and gave him some light work on the farm to do, and
there he remained while Dunbar journeyed to Salta, to find that Purvis
had left the place long before he arrived. Only a woman at Rosario
knew where he was, and this woman had learned not to tell. She had
married Purvis years ago, soon after she arrived in Argentine to be
governess to some English children. Her employers had not been kind to
her, and in a country where comforts were few she had had less than her
share of them. She was a girl of twenty then, and very pretty, and
hers was a faithful heart; and, cynical as the expression may sound,
she had had fidelity thrust upon her by the fact that she was utterly
friendless in the world. When Purvis married her she went to him
gladly. When he deserted her she even pretended to believe in him, for
the pitiful reason that there was no one else in the whole of that
strange land to whom she could turn. She was a woman to whom the easy
excuse of business could always be used in the widest sense of the
term, for she had been brought up to believe that that very
comprehensive word signified something almost as mysterious as affairs
of the spirit. It was not safe to assert of those who were engaged in
business whence they came or whither they would go. Sometimes she did
not see her husband for months, or even for a year at a time; he did
not always share his abundant days with her, but he had nearly always
come back to her when he was in trouble.
He arrived one night in Rosario without disguise of any sort, and
knocked at her humble door in one of the meanest parts of the town. He
was never beaten for long, and he announced to her that he wanted her
help in a new scheme that he had planned. His fortune was to be made
once more, but the scheme itself must remain hidden for a time. His
wife, upon this occasion, was to help him by acting as cat's-paw.
'It's a big thing,' Purvis said, 'and will require all my strength;'
and he announced his intention of remaining hidden in Rosario for a few
weeks while he rested completely. But his chronic inability to sleep
made rest impossible. He was calculating and adding up figures during
the watches of the night, and his strange, light-coloured eyes, with
the constant tear in them, became paler in colour and more suggestive
of bad nerves. He began to find his calculations difficult to balance,
and he even made some mistakes in his long rows of figures. The thing
worried him and he began to wonder if his head were going. He had
always overcome difficulties and had fought dangers with an absolute
belief in his own success. He was unscrupulous and cunning, but he had
never been beaten yet. It was horrible that sleep was the thing that
he could not command; but, alas! the exercise of will-power is not the
force by which sleep can be induced, and a placid or submissive mind
was unknown to Purvis. His wife watched him anxiously. She would go
for long walks with him in the early dawn or after it was dark, hoping
that the fresh air and the cooler weather might bring some sort of
repose to the wide-open pale eyes; but no sleep came, and Purvis took
to swallowing more tabloids, and setting out his rows of figures in a
nervous way, while his hand trembled and his plaintive voice became
irritable, and his eyes watered more than they were wont to do.
He had money in hand, and it was some sort of comfort to his wife to be
able to purchase for him the nourishing food which he required. She
had often been in sore straits for money herself, but she believed,
with pathetic conviction, that a woman can do with fewer comforts than
a man can, and she had never felt deprivations for herself so much as
she would have felt them for her husband. She cooked tempting dishes
for him, and enjoyed his companionship, and asked no questions. She
even allowed herself the purchase of a few new clothes now that money
was plentiful again, and these days, even with the anxiety of her
husband's ill-health hanging over her, were not by any means the
unhappiest of her life.
'I shan't be able to pull this business through,' said Purvis one
night, 'unless I sleep, and I can't live unless I succeed with it.'
He made his wife write innumerable letters for him in her own
handwriting, and signed with an entirely new name. But it was
difficult to transact these business affairs through the medium of
another person, and even his meek wife might some day ask questions!
If only he could pull himself together and get a firmer grasp of things
than he had at present! The commercial instinct was strong within him,
and he had a genius for figures, but insomnia and the state of his
nerves seemed to have deprived him of half his powers. He envied his
wife her gentle breathing and her deep sleep; and he would often wake
her in the night when he was most restless, and demand something at her
hands--a very weak cup of tea, or a little milk and hot water--in order
to hear the restoring sound of a human voice.
Lately, however, he had purchased a new sort of tabloid which he used
sparingly, according to the chemist's directions, but at which he often
looked longingly, believing that a little sleep lay within the tiny
glass bottle.
He had lain awake for hours this night, noting the ticking of his
watch, counting the hours as they struck on the neighbouring clock,
falling sometimes into an uneasy slumber which lasted only a few
minutes, and then waking at the sound of his own voice calling aloud in
his sleep. He tried every plan and contrivance, however childish, by
which men have sometimes courted slumber.
He lay in bed very still to-night, his wide-staring eyes looking into
the darkness. He heard every hour as it struck, and his active brain
refused to be quiet for a moment. Difficult things looked gigantic in
the darkness, and everything upon which his thoughts dwelt became
hopelessly exaggerated in his mind. Brandy and other stimulants had
never been a temptation to him; his life had too often depended upon
his wits for him to risk a muddled brain. But he still believed in
tabloids; and as the day dawned, and light crept through the window, he
looked longingly at the little glass vial lying on the dressing-table.
It was three o'clock, and if only he could get a couple of hours' deep
rest before the noise of the city began, he might yet be able to pull
himself together and arrange his affairs.
He rose from the bed and went with unfaltering steps to the
dressing-table and shook the tiny discs into the palm of his hand; and
then he counted them deliberately.
'It's kill or cure!' he said, with that queer courage which never
deserted him, even if it were based entirely upon self-seeking and
self-interest. He threw his head back with the characteristic action
with which he always swallowed his medicine, and went back to bed again.
Purvis slept; and it may have been that he was glad to sleep on for
ever, for he was tired through and through, and the only way to escape
failure was by death.
His wife mourned for him deeply and sincerely, as many better men have
not been mourned. There was only one thing she dreaded in the whole
world, and that was loneliness. She had endured so much of it in her
lifetime, and now that her husband was gone, whom as a matter of
necessity she had believed in, she was quite alone. She knew nothing
of business, and it never struck her as strange that there should be
money amounting to a considerable little fortune in a box in the house.
With the fear of want removed the poor creature blossomed into
youthfulness again, and she married an engineer on a new railway line,
who was very good to her. To him she ever held up the late lamented
Purvis as one of the best of husbands, and one, too, who had left her
well provided for.