Peter and Jane; Or, The Missing Heir

'Kitty!' said Jane; she took another step forward, and taking Kitty's face between her hands she turned it towards her. 'Kitty!'

'Isn't it ridiculous!' said Kitty. She swallowed down a sob in her throat and made a pretence of laughing while her hands played with her hair-brush, and her eyes, which endeavoured to blaze defiance, only succeeded in looking large and full of tears.

'I never knew—I never guessed–' began Jane helplessly.

'You were never meant to know,' said Kitty, and she turned away her face suddenly from Jane's encircling hands and buried it in the cushion of the chair. Her voice dropped ominously; she was still kneeling on the hearth-rug with the paraphernalia of her toilet about her—ribbons and gold-backed brushes, and a little enamel box for hair-pins. 'No one was ever meant to know!' she cried, 'and now I shall never be able to look you in the face again as long as we both do live! It's been going on so long, Jane, and you 've all been so sorry for Mrs. Avory, and so sorry for Toffy.'

'Does he know?' asked Jane, in a low voice.

Kitty raised her head and pretended to laugh again. 'I 've not proposed to him yet,' she said.

'But he cares,' said Jane, with conviction. 'He does care, Kitty!'

'Oh,' said Kitty, bursting into tears, 'isn't it all a frightful muddle!'

The conclusion, therefore, which may be arrived at on the vexed question as to which is preferable—the lot of the man who works or the lot of the woman who weeps, may be summed up in the convenient phrase, 'There is a great deal to be said on both sides.'

It is true that Kitty Sherard and Jane, left behind in comfortable and prosaic England, were spared the torment of flies and mosquitoes and other minor ills; they escaped most of the hard things of life, and enjoyed many of its pleasures and luxuries; and these mitigations seemed to them things of very little worth, and the life of action, when viewed from the safe security of their environment, appeared to be the only possible condition which might assuage pain or lessen the bitterness of separation.

Peter Ogilvie, meanwhile, and his friend, Nigel Christopherson, were in the midst of weather as hot as can be very well endured even by English people, who seem capable of resisting almost every sort of bad climate. The sun rose on the edge of the level plains every morning with horrible punctuality, and stared and blazed relentlessly until it had burned itself out in a beautiful rage and glory in the blood-red western sky.

'Dawn,' Ross said, 'is one of the things you are disposed to admire when you first come to Argentine, but when the hot weather begins you feel inclined to throw your boots at the sun when it rises.'

Now it was afternoon, and a heavy day's work in the corral was over. Peter was writing letters, while Ross and Toffy dozed in long cane chairs in the corridor. Purvis sat on the little cretonne-covered box beside the empty fireplace, and looked with lack-lustre eyes into space. He had been helping with some work on the estancia; but he had brought none of his own men with him, as some neighbours had done, and the ominous whisper grew that there was trouble down at his place. Ross treated the matter lightly, and explained it by saying that Purvis was making a fortune with his steamers, and was feeding his men on carne flacca. 'Purvis does his best, poor beast, and I believe he is worth a dozen detectives in this affair of yours, Peter.'

Peter himself, however, was inclined to draw back a little. 'He has put me on the wrong scent once or twice,' he said.

'After all, you haven't told him much,' said Ross.

And Peter agreed that this was so.

There was an undefined feeling in his mind that if he had to learn that his brother was alive he would like to hear of it through such legalized channels as Sir John Falconer was arranging. The detective spirit was not strong in Peter Ogilvie. He would have preferred to take the whole world into his confidence, and to ask them to speak out if they had anything to say. But Mr. Semple and Sir John had cautioned him against this procedure, and the inquiries he had been able to make had been conducted at one time with such surprising caution that no possible clue was given towards finding the child, while at others he had allowed more to be known than Mr. Semple, for instance, would have thought wise. He had lately become more reserved in his dealings with their neighbour at La Dorada, and began almost to try to discount the fact that he had ever consulted Purvis at all about his affairs. He lightly waved aside any information that was given him, and was always busy at the moment when Purvis wanted a few words with him. He advised Toffy to say, if he were asked, that Sir John Falconer was making inquiries, and that for the present they themselves were not going to move in the matter. Toffy and Ross both thought that they had gone too far to make such an attitude possible. 'What harm can it do to find out what he knows?' Ross said more than once.

But Peter still held back. 'I hate his confounded mysteries,' he said, 'and I don't attach much importance to things that are only known in a back-stairs sort of way.'

This afternoon in his letter to Jane he had given it as his opinion that the little man who they had thought might help them was proving to be rather a fraud. 'He is always starting ideas,' wrote Peter, 'and nothing comes of them. Why, bless me, you would think that Argentine was peopled with unclaimed babies and stiff with missing heirs.'

He felt better when he had unbosomed himself to Jane and had got rid of some of his impatience and ill-temper.

'I think I 'll ride to the post presently,' he said, getting up and stretching himself; 'it must get cooler soon.'

Purvis got up also from his little wooden seat by the fireplace. 'I 'll come with you,' he said. 'I am expecting letters which may want my immediate attention, and I can call at the telegraph office on my way. May I give you my company so far?' he asked. There was a touch of the lackey about Purvis, and his voice was humble sometimes to the verge of irritation.

'Como no?' said Peter lazily, in the formula of the country. His tone was not enthusiastic. Purvis was so prone to circumlocution that the fact that he had asked deliberately to accompany him on the ride towards the mail in the cool of the evening convinced him that the man could have nothing of importance to say.

They rode together over the short, tough turf of the camp a little way without speaking, and then Purvis began, in his smooth thin voice, riding a little nearer to his companion so as to make himself heard without undue exertion, 'I wanted to speak to you alone.'

'Say on,' said Peter.

When he was riding Purvis was perhaps at his worst. He had an ugly seat in the saddle, and his dark grey suit, made with trousers, was worn without riding-boots. He looked straight in front of him with his tired watery eyes with the perpetual tear in them, and said, 'I believe we are within measurable distance of finding the man you seek.'

Peter looked full at him, but the other did not turn his head; his horse cantered along lazily in the evening light as he sat loosely in the saddle, his pale, expressionless face turned towards the path by which they were travelling.

'The name of the man,' he said, 'is Edward Ogilvie.'

'Yes,' said Peter; 'my brother.' The thing was out now, and he could thank Heaven that he did not wear his heart on his sleeve.

'It is a very strange story!' said Purvis.

'May we have it?' asked Peter briefly. He might employ Purvis, but it galled him to think that his future lay in his hands.

'No,' said Purvis, in his hesitating, thin voice. 'You can't have it for the present. To begin with,' he continued, turning towards Peter for the first time, and raising pathetically large eyes towards him, 'I am not going to speak about it until I am sure, nor am I going to speak about it until I have asked you for some necessary details which will make a mischance or a case of mistaken identity impossible. I don't want to make a fool of myself, as you have trusted me so far.'

'Ask me anything you like,' said Peter laconically. His mind was pretty full just then, and there was a note of confidence in Purvis's voice which gave him the idea that their search was nearly over. He began to wonder how much money he had, and whether there was any chance of the Scottish place being his. Bowshott, of course, would pass away from him, and the beautiful house with its galleries and its gardens would be the property of some unknown man. Possibly the man had a wife, and where Jane was to have reigned as mistress there would be some woman, unused to great houses, and with manners perhaps not suited to her position. He wondered what his mother would have thought about it all, and whether she could in the least realize what the result of her unfinished letter to him might be. Whatever her faults she had been a great lady to her finger-tips. He remembered her, as he had been wont to see her, showing her pictures and gardens to the foreign royalties who came to see her, or receiving Her Majesty when she drove over from Windsor and called upon her. Only Jane could ever fill her place adequately; Jane with her short skirts and graceful, swinging walk, and her queer plain hats that so perfectly became her, and made country neighbours look overdressed. He loved to remember her in a hundred different ways—in white satin, with a string of pearls about her neck; at meets, on one of her sixteen-hand hunters; playing golf; painting the rabbit-hutch in the garden; binding up Toffy's hand that morning, ages ago, when he had had a spill out of his motor-car; playing with the school-children on the lawn; or, best of all, perhaps, dancing in the great ballroom at Bowshott, and sitting with him afterwards in the dimness of his mother's tapestried chamber, her great white feather fan laid upon her knees.

'Is the man married?' asked Peter, with a drawl.

'He is married,' Purvis said, as the two horses swung together in their easy stride.

'Wife alive?' Peter slowed down and lighted a cigarette with deliberation.

'That is a part of the story which I cannot at present divulge,' said Purvis.

'It sounds mysterious!' said Peter, sending his horse into a canter again.

'If it were written in a romance it would hardly be believed,' said the other.

'You were going to ask me some questions,' said Peter, as though to put an end to any dissertation on the romantic side of the story. 'It is a business matter,' he said, 'and we had better be businesslike about it. We can unfold the romance of it later.'

'That is my wish,' said Purvis gravely.

Peter began to tell himself that he was treating the man badly. He had nothing to gain beyond a little money for his services, and so far he had behaved well and with tact. He was obviously disinterested, although perhaps the bill for pursuing his investigations might be fairly high.

'I have reason to believe that the identity of the man can be proved,' said Purvis; 'but I am not going to risk finding a mare's nest, as I have told you.'

'I am not much help to you,' said Peter. 'I have never set eyes oh my brother since I was two years old.'

'This is his photograph,' said Purvis, producing a coloured photograph from his pocket.

Peter took it into his hands and looked long at it. It represented a little boy with fair curls seated in a photographer's arm-chair.

'Can you tell me if it resembles any of your family?' said Purvis.

'Well, 'pon my word I don't know,' said Peter. 'The photograph is a small one, you see, and evidently not a very good one, and to my mind all children of that age look exactly alike. He looks a good little chap,' he finished, with a touch of kindness in his voice. If his brother turned out to be a good fellow reparation would be made easier; and, heavens! how badly the man had been treated.

'The chief danger,' said Purvis, 'lies in the fact that even a strong chain of evidence is not likely to be accepted by those who would benefit by Edward Ogilvie's death.'

'I suppose one would play a fair game,' said Peter shortly. 'I should like to know where you have heard of the man?'

'I may tell you that much,' said Purvis. 'I heard of him at Rosario.'

'Any reason why he should not have communicated with his friends all these years?'

'Within the next few weeks,' said Purvis, 'I hope to be able to bring you face to face with your brother, and then you can put what inquiries you like to him. You must surely see that it is necessary to act with caution until the thing is decided. Even now I can't be quite sure if this man's claim is valid; but once the story is out a dozen claimants may arise, and it would cost you a fortune to sift all the evidence which they might bring.'

'Yes, I see that,' said Peter.

'I am disappointed that the photograph conveys nothing to you,' said Purvis. 'I looked upon it as an important link in the chain of evidence, thinking there might be another like it amongst the old servants, perhaps, at your home.'

Peter looked at it again. 'The trouble is,' he said, 'that there are no old servants who knew us as children. He was handing the photograph back to Purvis when an idea struck him. 'I tell you what, though,' he exclaimed, 'I believe the sash round the child's waist is made of Ogilvie tartan.'

A bare-legged boy on a lean pony was seen approaching them in a cloud of dust. The pony's short canter made his pace as easy as a rocking-chair; and Lara's son, who rode him, was half asleep in the heat. The post-bag dangled from his saddle, and the reins lay on the pony's neck.

'Any letters?' said Peter in Spanish, and the boy handed the bag to him. The mail-boat from England, which was run on purpose to carry Jane's weekly letter to him, had brought the big square envelope with its usual commendable punctuality. Peter chose it out from the rest of the letters, and, handing Purvis a packet which belonged to him, he gave the bag back to the boy, who cantered along with his bare legs swinging until he disappeared into the level glare of the setting sun.

Peter let his horse amble on slowly, and read his letter while he rode.

'I must push on, I think,' said the quiet voice of Purvis beside him. 'There are one or two things which, I gather from my letters, I must put straight at the estancia. I hope to have definite news to communicate to you before long.'

'Thanks!' said Peter, giving him a nod. 'You will let me hear from you as soon as you know anything?' He turned his horse homewards, and Purvis rode on alone.

'If he has found my brother,' quoth Peter, 'Purvis has done his job, and I can't complain; but he has got to settle the thing up without all this confounded mystery, or else he can leave it alone. There is one thing perfectly clear. Edward himself knows nothing about his parents or his prospects, or he would have claimed the property long ago. Now, how has Purvis found out about the man what he doesn't know himself? Where has he got his clue? One thing is pretty certain—that he doesn't want me to meet my brother yet, which looks very much as if our friend Purvis was going to make some sort of bargain with the heir, whoever he is, before he allows him to know the truth about himself. Well, the affair will be judged by English lawyers when we get home, and if it is a case of blackmail, for instance, English people are not very fond of that sort of thing, so Purvis may not be able to make such a good bargain as he thinks.

'Of course the chain of evidence may be perfectly simple. Purvis has probably got hold of the name of whoever it was that brought Edward here, and has traced him somewhere, and has got the whole story from him. My mother had always an unlimited supply of money; she could have settled a large sum on the people who looked after him, and of course it is evident that some money must have been paid, though the lawyers could find no trace of it amongst her papers. The only other hypothesis is that it is a case of some extraordinary aberration of memory, and that, the child she disliked having been removed, she forgot about him altogether. All my life I never remember hearing him mentioned; and as my mother did not return to Bowshott until I was nearly eight years old, very little may have been said to her that would recall the fact of the boy's death.

'It is the beastly uncertainty of it,' he continued, as he rode slowly home on the dusty track which was the apology for a road across the camp. 'If the estate pays me sufficient to live upon I needn't grumble; but Purvis must give me an account of what he has been doing, and put me in possession of the facts of the case. One always distrusts the middleman, and wonders if he is making a good bargain on both sides. A small man like Purvis always tries to be important, and to make every one believe that he alone holds the key to mysteries, and that no one can get on without him. I don't at present see how he can defraud either me or my brother, even if he wants to; but I am not going to be content with hints or suggestions, as if I were living in a penny novelette.'

He rode slowly home through the heat that rose like a palpable gas from the scorched ground, until the little estancia house hove in sight again. He found that Toffy and Ross were still enjoying their afternoon siesta. There was not a bit of shade anywhere, and the heat seemed to burn through the roof until the very floor was hot to walk upon. His thoughts went back to Purvis in his tweed clothes and the bowler bat with the pugaree on it, and he wondered how he fared in the scorching heat. Probably the anaemic little man hardly knew what it was to be too hot. He used to ride over the camp when even the peons did not show their heads out of doors, and his hands were always cold and damp to the touch. Peter drank some tea and sat down at little Mrs. Chance's writing-table in the drawing-room, and wrote to Jane. There was a feeling of storm in the air, and he envied the two men sleeping luxuriously in the corridor.

'When you have been out here a year or two,' said the sleepy voice of Ross from the depths of a long cane chair, 'you will find that letters are not only impossible but unnecessary. No one expects to hear from one after the first month or two, and if one did write there would be nothing to say.'

'When my creditors get too troublesome,' said Toffy, also waking up, 'I shall emigrate here and lose my own address. With strict economy one might live very cheaply in Argentine.'

Lara's boy, who had come with the letters, had waited to ride back with the bag to the far distant post office; and the Englishmen at the estancia stood and watched him—a tiny figure on his tireless little Argentine pony—riding away eastward until once more a cloud of dust swallowed him up. The humble postman seemed to form a link with home, and in three weeks' time the letters which they had confided to him would be safely in the hands of those to whom they were written in England. The pony's unshod hoofs had made hardly any sound on the turf as he cantered off, and Lara's boy, in his loose shirt and shabby clothes, and his bare feet hanging stirrupless on each side of the pony, disappeared like a wraith. There was a week to wait before he would come with any more letters.

'I wish the storm would burst or blow over,' said Ross; 'the heat is worse than ever to-day, and it doesn't seem as though we were going to have a cool night.'

'Even the peons look curled up,' said Toffy, glancing at a group of men, picturesquely untidy, with loose shirts and scarlet boinas on their heads, who lounged against the palo á pique of the corral.

'What idle brutes they are, really!' said Ross; 'and they 're always ten times worse when Chance is away. Look at those bits of paper littering the place,' he went on fussily. 'Now I know that those men have been told thousands of times not to let things fly about like that. But it saves them trouble when they clean a room to sweep everything out of doors and then leave it lying about.'

Probably most men who own property have an inherent dislike to seeing scraps of paper lying about; the sight suggests trippers and visitors' days, and Peter stepped down from the raised corridor, and with his stick began poking the bits of paper into the powdery mud which was all that at present formed the estancia garden.

'I believe we might paper the whole house with Purvis's telegrams,' he said, laughing, as he shoved a bit of coloured paper under the ground.

'Salter,' he said to himself—'Salter. It sounds like the agony column at home. Well, Ross and I had better stop acting as scavengers for the household, or we may learn too much of Purvis's domestic affairs.'

He stopped poking with his stick; and, although he laughed, he was as much annoyed at having seen the name on the telegram as he would have been had he inadvertently overlooked another man's hand at cards.

The storm blew away in the night, and after the dawn the sky was a heavenly blue, so brilliant that it could not be overlooked. In the early morning the mimosa trees threw cool shadows to westward, and little parakeets, making their flights from bough to bough, screamed overhead. On the estancia work began early; some one had to lasso a novillo for the pot, and the rodeo looked like a seething, bubbling cauldron, with its moving mass of cattle. The easy paces of the horses on which all the work of the place was done made riding a matter not of exercise at all; and the only thing necessary was to duck heads to avoid the mimosa boughs, and to guide the horses round the holes and stumps in the ground at a gentle canter. The novillo was lassoed, and the sun began to be sultry when the three men rode back to breakfast, congratulating themselves that, as the day seemed likely to be as hot as usual, there was not a great deal of work to be done, at least until the cool of the evening.

'Is that Purvis?' asked Toffy, as they approached the house and tethered their horses by the simple expedient of throwing their reins over their heads and letting them trail upon the ground. 'When, in the name of the Prophet, does that fellow sleep?' It was barely ten o'clock when they rode back to breakfast, and Purvis must have started on his ride almost at dawn.

'Hallo!' said Ross, greeting him with a certain kindliness which a very big man will show to one who is small and weak, even if he has growled at his appearance a moment before. 'Hallo, Purvis, where have you come from, and when do you get any sleep?'

'I don't think that sleep is very necessary to me,' said Purvis; 'and I generally find that I work just as well when I have only two or three hours' rest.'

'That's very odd,' said Toffy amicably.

'I came back about my little boy,' said Purvis; 'I have to go down to Buenos Ayres, and I want to know if I may leave him here with you.'

Ross assented, and Toffy remarked that he believed with training he himself might make a very fair nursery-maid.

'Things are a little bit disturbed at my place,' said Purvis. 'I have so many mixed nationalities down there, and they don't get on well together, and are difficult to manage. I would rather not leave Dick, if you could have him—Dick will be a good boy—no?' he said, speaking in the questioning negative so common in Argentine, and addressing the pale-faced little boy in a manner far too babyish for his years.

Dick made no promise; but feeling, boy-like, that he never quite knew what being good involved, he wriggled uneasily in his chair. His father laid one of his hands on the boy's dark hair and the other beneath the delicately pointed chin, and, turning up the little face towards him, he kissed it with womanish affection.

'When will you get the train?' said Ross presently, as they sat at breakfast in the hall. 'You can't catch the one to-night, and there's not another for two days. Your best plan would have been to send us a wire about the boy, and to have taken your own steamer down to Taco; it would have saved a long bit of riding.'

'I wanted to say good-bye to my little one,' said Purvis.

'Well,' said Ross hospitably, 'you are welcome here till your train starts.'

'I must be off to-night,' said Purvis. 'If I start at eight this evening I shall catch the train at one a.m. at Taco.'

'You will be dead, Purvis!' said Peter.

Chance had once asserted that Purvis was the only man he knew who had no sense of fatigue and no sense of fear. 'It's quite true,' he said, when there was a murmur of astonishment from his listeners; 'and, much as I dislike the man, I have never known him to be afraid of anything. It may, of course, be due to a lack of imagination on his part; but I myself believe that it is the result of having been so frequently in tight places. I don't believe he can even handle a gun; and yet if he were surrounded and mobbed he would probably only blink with his watery eyes or help himself to another tabloid.'