Peter and Jane Part 15

It was a horrible time for both these affectionate elderly people who had always lived a peaceful, orderly, well-conducted life together, and whose home had been, in the mind of the canon at least, the model household of the neighbourhood. Also, it was a real shock to him to realize that Henrietta did not mean to yield in this matter. She spoke with regret, but she spoke firmly. It must always be a surprise--even to a prophet--when a dumb creature speaks, and in a certain sense Mrs.

Wrottesley had always been dumb. And now, after years of silence and affectionate wifely submission, Mrs. Wrottesley was a.s.serting herself.

'You must be reasonable, dear,' her husband said at last.

Mrs. Wrottesley replied, 'I want to be reasonable;' and she told him the whole story of how her presence might save from very serious consequences two people who were admittedly not very wise, but who were certainly nothing more than foolish, and might prevent a scandal which would damage them in the eyes of the world and result in all sorts of trouble for Mrs. Avory.

'The scandal cannot now be prevented,' said Canon Wrottesley. 'I heard myself from Mr. Lawrence this morning telling me the whole story. My love, you cannot touch pitch and not be defiled; Mrs. Avory must send for her own relations, if she has any, to help her out of this regrettable business. I cannot allow you to appear in the matter at all.'

'I have had my letters addressed here for the last two days,' said Mrs.

Wrottesley.

The canon rose from his chair and began to pace up and down the room.

'I don't know what people will say,' he said, his forehead knitted into a frown and his fingers impatiently letting off small pistol-shots against his palm. There had never been a better wife or mother, he admitted to himself, than Henrietta Wrottesley, but she was a child still in many ways. 'To-morrow is Sunday,' he went on, 'and we must appear in church together. In this way only can we shut people's mouths and prevent their talking, and although I don't like anything in the form of secrecy or underhand actions, no one need know that you have been staying here.'

'I am afraid,' said Mrs. Wrottesley, still in that unyielding tone of gentle regret, 'that it is too late to keep my movements secret. There is an account of the accident in the local paper in which it is stated that I was staying here at the time.'

Canon Wrottesley loved to see his name in print, and looked with interest at the cutting while Mrs. Wrottesley added, 'I sent the communication to the paper.'

The canon found himself wondering in a puzzled way what was the ultimatum that a man should impose upon a woman. What, in point of fact, was the force that could be brought to bear upon the case? In primitive days the matter would have been easily enough settled, but in modern times moral force is the only lever, and although most women, he admitted, were very easily influenced by moral force, it struck him painfully that upon this occasion his wife was not going to be moved by it.

A beneficent Providence who, I think we may allow, comes often to the a.s.sistance of persons whose storm rages in quite a small and narrow teacup so long as they are genuinely attached to each other, may have designed that at this moment Lydia of the heavy foot should enter with the second post's letters, and amongst those which had been sent on to Mrs. Wrottesley was one directed to her husband in dear Miss Abingdon's handwriting.

The canon opened it unheedingly. Miss Abingdon often sent him little notes, but never, perhaps, had she written one which spoke more genuinely out of a full heart than did this. She had written in the middle of the night, although she felt how disorderly and almost indecorous such a proceeding was. By so doing she had missed the evening post, but she sent the missive to the village early in the morning by the hand of a groom, and felt glad, as she did so, that there were no secrets in her life. A letter posted at an unaccustomed hour suggested intrigues, and Miss Abingdon wondered how people could live who had such things upon their consciences.

Her unusual behaviour accounts for the fact that her letter arrived by the second post at Hulworth; Canon Wrottesley was so much upset at the time that he read half-way through it before he quite realized what it was about.

'MY DEAR CANON,'--it ran--'you must allow me to say what I think of your splendid conduct in regard to poor little Mrs. Avory. I had heard the story, of course, of her very indiscreet behaviour, but it was not till this morning that I knew how splendidly you had thrown yourself into the breach by allowing Mrs. Wrottesley to go over to Hulworth to stay and nurse the poor thing. I must tell you that I hear on all sides nothing but the kindest things said about your action in the matter. I do not often write so unreservedly as at present, but I do feel strongly on the subject, and on occasions such as this I may be allowed to say that it takes a good man and a broad-minded one to act promptly and generously--would that there were more of them in the English Church!'

Miss Abingdon used to fear afterwards that perhaps she had said too much; but to her also, as to Mrs. Wrottesley, the relief of speaking her mind once in a way was irresistible.

Of course it weakened the canon's position to show the letter to his wife. He ought to have relented gracefully and with dignity, and to have consented as a personal favour, even against his proper judgment, to his wife's remaining where she was. But Miss Abingdon's letter was too full of kind remarks to be kept to himself. He handed it to Henrietta, and when she had read it he folded it up carefully and put it in his pocket.

'That,' he said, 'is one of the best women that ever lived, and perhaps, who knows, there may be others who see this matter in the right light also.' All that he had previously said pa.s.sed completely out of his mind as he talked of the insight and the complete understanding that some good women evinced. He began to speak with manly kindliness of the poor little invalid upstairs, and when at last he bade good-bye to his wife he kissed her affectionately and bade her--in his usual formula--not do too much.

Miss Abingdon's letter had shown the canon to himself in his true light; before he reached home he had come to believe that it was he who had urged his wife to go to Hulworth. As was usual with him when he felt strongly, he adopted a character role, and his handsome face wore a more than usually beneficent and great-minded expression upon it as he walked with his fine erect carriage through the village that night; while it would hardly have required a playbill of _dramatis personae_ to indicate the fact that the canon was living the part of the Vicar of Wakefield in the supreme moment when he visits Olivia in prison. He had promised his wife before leaving to drive over often to see her during her stay at Hulworth; and the following Sunday he preached one of his most memorable sermons on the text--'And when they shall take up some deadly thing it shall not hurt them.'

CHAPTER XI

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 fiancee 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 a.s.surance 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 sh.o.r.e. 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 sh.o.r.e, and its green hill with the ruined castle behind, is a haven where many sea-sick pa.s.sengers 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 pa.s.s 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 ash.o.r.e. 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 p.r.o.nouncing '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 sc.r.a.p 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 ash.o.r.e. 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 n.o.ble.'

'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.