Peter and Jane; Or, The Missing Heir

And, alas for Sir Nigel and his lightly held treasures of art! his pictures and the vases ranged in great glass cases in the hall were heirlooms, and Toffy in his most impecunious days would often look at them sadly and shake his head, murmuring to himself, 'I 'd take five hundred pounds for the lot, and be glad to get rid of them.' There were days when in a gentle, philosophical way he felt a positive sense of injury in thinking of the vases behind the big glass doors, and he would then go into intricate and complicated sums in arithmetic whereby he could tell what it cost him per annum to look at the contents of the cases and the old portraits in their dim frames.

This afternoon he was lying on a florid and uncomfortable-looking sofa in a very large drawing-room, in front of a fireplace of white marble in scroll patterns and with a fender of polished steel. It was probably the ugliest as well as the least comfortable room in the house, but it happened to be the only one in which there was a good fire that afternoon; and Toffy, descending from his bedroom, weak and ill with influenza, had come in there at two o'clock, and was now lying down with a railway-rug placed across his feet, and his head uncomfortably supported by a hard roller-cushion and an ornamentation in mahogany which gracefully finished off the pattern of the sofa-frame. Many men when they are ill take the precaution of making their wills; Sir Nigel's preparation for a possible early demise always took the form of elaborately and sadly adding up his accounts. He had a large ledger beside him on the sofa, and slips of paper covered with intricate figures which neither he nor any one else could decipher.

His faithful valet Hopwood had been dispatched to London in order to learn chauffeur's work; for Toffy had decided, after working the matter out to a fraction, that a considerable saving could be effected in this way. His debts to the garage were being duly entered amongst Toffy's liabilities at this moment as he lay on the sofa in the vast cold drawing-room.

The drawing-room was not often used now. But it was the custom of his housekeeper to air the rooms once a week; and, this being Wednesday, she had lighted a fire there, while Lydia, a young housemaid and general factotum, had allowed all other fires to go out. There was a palpable sense of chilliness about the room, and in one corner of it the green-and-gold wall-paper showed stains of damp. Long gilded mirrors between tall windows occupied one side of the room, and had marble shelves beneath them upon which were placed ornate Bohemian glass vases and ormolu clocks and candlesticks. Some uncovered and highly polished mahogany tables imparted a hard and somewhat undraped look to the apartment. The windows, with their aching lines of plate-glass, were draped with rep curtains of vivid green, while the floor was covered with an Aubusson carpet exquisite in its colour and design. And between the green woollen bell-ropes on each side of the fireplace and above the cold hideousness of the marble mantelpiece hung a portrait by Romney of a lady as beautiful as a flower.

Sir Nigel had endeavoured to eat for lunch part of a chicken which his housekeeper had warmed up with a little grey sauce; and he was now wondering as he lay on the sofa whether any one would come if he were to tug at the green bell-rope over his head, or whether he could make his own way upstairs to his bedroom and get some fresh pocket-handkerchiefs. He had had a temperature for the greater part of the week, and he was now feeling as if his legs did not altogether belong to him; while, to make up for their feebleness and lightness, his head was most insistently there, and felt horribly hot and heavy.

He had just decided that he had better mount the long stairs to his room, for not only was there the consideration of handkerchiefs; there was medicine too which the doctor had told him to take, but which he always forgot at the right moment. He thought the journey had better be made now, and he could do the two things at one and the same time. He walked with uneven steps to the window and looked out upon some stretches of field which were euphemistically termed the Park, and watched a flock of sheep huddled together to protect themselves from the first sharp touch of frost, when he heard the sound of hoofs and saw Peter ride up to the door.

'It's an extraordinary thing,' he said to himself as he saw his friend dismount, 'Peter always seems to come when you want him. I believe he has got some sort of instinct which tells him when his friends are down on their luck!'

Peter would, of course, fetch the medicine from upstairs, and the pocket-handkerchiefs. Toffy wondered if he had ever felt ill in his life, and thought to himself, gazing without envy at the neat, athletic figure on the horse, what a good fellow he was. He crept back to the sofa again, and extending his thin hand to Peter as he entered, said, 'You see here the wreck of my former self! Sit down, Peter, and ring for tea; there isn't the smallest chance of your getting any!'

'Why didn't you come to Bowshott, you ass, if you are ill?' said Peter sternly. 'You will kill yourself some day coming down to this half-warmed barn in the winter-time.'

'It isn't half warmed,' said Toffy. 'I wish it were! This room is all right, isn't it? I aired another sofa by sleeping on it last night.'

'What on earth for?' demanded Peter, still in a tone of remonstrance. Toffy had been his fag at Eton, and Peter had got into the habit of taking care of him. He knew his friend's constitution better than most people did, and he expended much affection upon him, and endeavoured without any success to make him take care of himself. 'Why didn't you sleep in your bed like a Christian?' he demanded sternly. 'You will kill yourself if you go on playing the fool with your health!'

'The sheets seemed a bit damp in my bed, I thought,' said Toffy simply.

'Then why didn't your idiot of a housekeeper air them?'

'The duty of airing sheets is invested in the person of one Lydia, the niece of the above-mentioned housekeeper,' said Toffy. 'I asked her in the morning if my sheets had been aired, and she said that they had not. She further explained that she had taken the precaution of feeling them, and that they had not seemed very wet!'

'Oh, hang Mrs. Avory!' said Peter inwardly. 'Why has not Toffy got a good wife to look after him? Look here,' he said decisively, 'I am going to sleep over here to-night, and see that you go to bed, and I'm going to get your sheets now and warm 'em.'

'You 'll get a beastly dinner if you stay,' said Toffy through his nose.

Peter brought the sheets down in a bundle, and placing a row of hideous walnut-wood chairs with their legs in the fender, he proceeded to tinge the fine linen sheets a deep brown.

'They are warmed through,' he said grimly, when the smell of scorched linen became intrusive.

Peter made tea in the drawing-room and spilt a good deal of boiling water on the steel fender, and then he drew the green rep curtains across the cold windows, and made up a roaring fire, and pulled a screen round the sofa. He fetched his friend's forgotten medicine from his bedroom and administered it, and told him with a lame attempt at jocosity that he should have a penny if he took it like a lamb! Peter was full of small jokes this afternoon, and full, too, of a certain restlessness which had not expended itself when he had warmed sheets and made up fires and brewed tea to the destruction of the Hulworth steel fenders. He talked cheerfully on a dozen topics of conversation current in the neighbourhood, and on Toffy's invitation he sent a servant over to Bowshott to give notice that he would stay the night, and to bring back his things.

'I have been doing up my accounts,' said Toffy, 'and I believe the saddest book I ever read is my bank-book! A man has been down from the British Museum to look at those vases in the hall, and he says that one of them alone is worth four thousands pounds!—four thousand pounds, Peter! for a vase that's eating its head off in a glass case, and might be broken any day by a housemaid, while I perish with hunger!'

'If it's money,' began Peter easily, 'you 're an idiot if you don't let me know what you want.'

And then the whole realization of his uncertain position smote him sharply and cruelly for a moment as he remembered that he did not know how he stood with the world as regards money, and that probably he was not in the position to lend a five-pound note to any one. He had accumulated through sheer laziness a certain number of large debts, the payment of which had never troubled himself or his creditors, who were only too glad to keep his name on their books; but now it seemed that if he were to have merely a younger son's portion he might even find himself in debt to his brother's estate. He had gone thoroughly with the lawyer into the will of his father, and found that everything which it was possible to tie up on the elder son had been willed to him. His own share of the patrimony if his brother were still alive would be but a small one.

He got up from his chair and walked to the window, and pulling aside the curtain looked out on the frosty garden.

'It's going to be a bitter cold night,' he said. 'I think I will just look in at your room again, and see if they have made up the fire properly.'

He returned to the drawing-room and took up two or three newspapers in turn and laid them down again, while Toffy watched him gravely.

'I 've had a bit of a jar lately,' he said at last, taking up his stand with his back to the fire near the sofa.

'Have some dinner first,' said Toffy, 'and then we 'll go into the matter, as I always do with my creditors. You see, if one has a cook like Mrs. Cosby, there is an element of chance in the matter of getting dinner at all; and another thing is it may be so bad you won't survive it; so it's not much use being miserable before dinner, is it, when perhaps you may be buried comfortably and respectably afterwards?'

The presence of Lydia, who listened open-mouthed to all that was said, made conversation impossible, until at last, in an ecstasy of importance at having broken a dessert dish, she placed the wine upon the table and withdrew. Toffy carried the decanters into the drawing-room, where he believed he and Peter would be more comfortable, and having placed them on the table by the fire he congratulated his friend that they had both survived the ordeal of dinner, and then he suggested that Peter should tell him what was up.

'Rather a beastly thing has happened,' said Peter. He rose from the chair where he was sitting and went and stood by the marble mantelpiece. The black tie which he wore seemed to accentuate his fairness, and it was a boyish, unheroic figure which leaned against the whiteness of the marble mantelpiece as he began his puzzling tale. It did not take very long in the telling, and until he had finished Toffy did not speak. Indeed, there was silence for some time in the room after Peter had done, and then, there being no necessity for much speech or protestation between the two, Toffy said merely, 'What are you going to do?'

'I am going to the Argentine next week,' said Peter. 'It seems proved beyond any manner of doubt that my mother paid the passage of a woman and a little boy to go there in the very month and in the year that my brother was supposed to have died, and Cintra or Lisbon are the last places where there is even the vaguest evidence of her having been seen with two boys.'

Toffy lay on the sofa thinking, his arm thrown above his head in the attitude that was characteristic of him during the many weeks of illness that he usually had in the year.

'I can't think why,' he said, 'you should go yourself. There must be plenty of lawyers in Buenos Ayres who would undertake to see the thing through for you.'

'Well, come,' said Peter, 'if my brother has been done out of the place for twenty-five years, and if he is a good chap, and all that, I suppose the least one could do would be to try and look as if one didn't grudge giving him back his own.'

Probably there is an element of fairness about English men and women which obtrudes itself from time to time to their disadvantage; and Peter already found himself occupying, in his own mind at least, the position of the younger son.

'We will brave the terrors of the vasty deep together,' said Toffy; 'it's no use your going alone.'

'You ain't up to it,' said Peter gruffly, 'thanks all the same, old chap.'

'I must fly somewhere,' said Toffy, 'it doesn't much matter where.'

'Has the usual acute financial crisis come?' Peter said, looking affectionately at the long, thin figure on the sofa. 'You can't the least deceive me into thinking you had better go into Argentine to hunt for a man who has been missing for twenty-five years. It isn't good enough!'

'I shall have to get a lot of boots,' said Toffy thoughtfully; 'it seems the right sort of thing to do when one is starting on an expedition, and I would rather like to get some of those knives that fellows seem to buy when they go out to South America.'

'You see,' objected Peter, allowing the question of boots and hunting-knives to lapse, 'the place is right enough, I have no doubt, but it's pretty big, and I don't a bit know what is in front of me. I 'll tell you what I will do, though, I 'll send for you as soon as I get there if I find it's a white man's country at all, and then we will jog round together.'

'I suppose we couldn't go in a yacht?' said Toffy, inspired with a sudden suggestion, and sitting up on the sofa full of grave interest. 'There 'd be much less chance of being copped on the pier than if one travelled on a liner. Another thing, I 'm not at all sure that a yacht wouldn't be a good investment; it really is the only way to live economically and keep out of the reach of duns at the same time. A nice little eighty-tonner now, for instance, with Just two or three hands and a boy on board. What could be cheaper than that? And you could live the simple life to any extent that you liked! But of course something larger would be wanted for Argentine, and she couldn't be fitted out in time. No, Peter, I think I 'll risk having the heavy hand of the law laid upon me at starting, and we 'll just have to lump it and go in a mail steamer.'

Peter laughed. 'My bold buccaneer!' he said.

They sat silent for a time in the drawing-room with its crude colours and priceless china, while the big fire in the burnished steel grate roared with a jolly sound up the big chimney, and the air was frosty and cold outside. The room despite its hideousness was full of pleasant recollections to them both, for when Hulworth was not let Toffy had often assembled bachelor parties there, and it had always been a second home to Peter, where he had been wont to keep a couple of guns and some of his 'things.'

The actual journey to Argentine was not a matter demanding any courage on the part of either of the young men, but the result of the journey might have a grave effect on the fortune of Peter Ogilvie. Tomorrow was to have been his wedding-day; and this fact being persistently present to both men, they left the subject to the last. It was with an effort that Peter said, before they parted for the night, 'Whatever happens, we mean to try to be married when I come back. Jane is awfully plucky about it, but this confounded Court of Chancery does not seem to regard me with much favour at present.'

'It's only for a year,' said Toffy hopefully. 'Let's make a solemn covenant that we shall meet in this very room on the 25th of October 1911, with the wedding-day fixed for to-morrow again.'

'Where is your Bible?' said Peter. 'If you haven't one in your pocket or under your pillow, will it do if I kiss your account-book?'

'The whole thing can be just as we intended it to be,' said Toffy cheerfully. 'And this time next year Jane will be staying with Miss Abingdon, and old Wrot will be ironing out his surplice—at least Mrs. Wrot will, and he 'll look on and think he 's doing it. And I 'll be here, probably with a cold in my head as usual, and thereto I plight thee my troth!'

He fingered in his pocket the wedding-ring which Peter had given him for safe custody, and the care of which had seriously disturbed his slumbers at night. 'I 'll keep the ring until then, Peter, and place it on the third finger of Jane's left hand. No, no, you do that, by the way; and I shall have to wait until I get a wife of my own.'

'Here 's to her good health!' said Peter. And they endeavoured to be lively, as befits the subject of weddings; but Peter was thinking that perhaps his own wedding-day might be five years hence, and however they might plan that it should be the same as they had first intended, it was a long time to wait. And Toffy was wondering how long Horace Avory meant to live, and if Carrie would mind very much his going to Argentine, and whether she would write him one of those long tear-blistered letters in her indistinct handwriting, which he found so hard to read, and, suppose Horace Avory never died (as seemed quite likely), what would be the end of it all? Also, he wondered whether Carrie and Miss Sherard would get on well together if they were to meet, and he hoped with manly stupidity that they might be friends. But what he wondered more than anything else at present was whether Kitty Sherard would allow him to go and say good-bye to her. Toffy was feeling ill, and his vitality was low; in his weakness he thought with an insistence that was almost homesick in its intensity how beautiful it would be to see her in this ugly old house of his, in one of her rose-coloured gowns, and with her brown curls and her hopelessly baffling and bewildering manner of speech.

And each of the two young men, being absorbed in quite other subjects, talked cheerfully of the voyage, and speculated on what sort of sport they might incidentally get; and they discussed much more seriously the fishing flies and guns they should take with them than the possible finding of Peter's brother or Peter's own change of fortune.

Lydia, listening at the door before she went to bed, for no particular reason except that her aunt had forbidden it, decided that her master and Captain Ogilvie were planning a sporting expedition together—'which means dullness and aunt for me for a few months to come,' said Lydia, with a sniff.

CHAPTER X

So Peter went to London to collect his kit and to say good-bye to Jane Erskine, and Nigel Christopherson ordered a great many new boots of various designs, and some warlike weapons, and then there came the time when he had to write to Mrs. Avory to say that he was going away, and when in the solitude of his life at Hulworth he had time to sit down and wonder what she would think about it. He was not long left in doubt. A telegram came first, and then a letter. 'Dearest, dearest,' this ran, 'I cannot let you go away.' It was a horribly compromising letter, but it came from a poor little woman who had fought long odds, and who was often very tired, and who sat for the greater part of the day making blouses for which she was seldom paid. Mrs. Avory was not a strong woman, nor in any way a great-minded woman, but she was one who, in spite of weakness and a good deal of silliness, clung almost fiercely to the fact that she must be good, and who kept faithfully the promises she had made to a wholly unworthy person in the village church at home twelve years ago. Every word of the letter was an appeal to her dear, dear Nigel to stay in England and not leave her alone. She had so few friends and so little to look forward to except his Sunday visits. And then this poor tear-blotched letter which was neither very grammatical nor legibly written changed its tone suddenly, and Mrs. Avory said that perhaps it was better that he should go. Everything was very difficult, and it seemed that although his society was the one thing that she loved in the world, perhaps the fact of seeing him made things almost more difficult. Her husband, she heard, had been watching her movements lately; they said he wanted to marry some one else, so really and truly Nigel had better go, and if possible forget all about her for ever.

Toffy finished reading the letter and groaned. 'Was she never to have a good time!' he wondered, thinking of the dull room and the half-finished blouses upon the table, the economical gas jets in the fireplace in lieu of the glow of a bright fire, and the dingy paper on the walls. The whole thing was too hard on her, he thought, and everything in the world seemed to be against her.

Long ago, when he was little more than a boy, he had met Horace Avory and his wife in an out-of-the-way fishing village in Wales. Avory's treatment of the small timid woman had roused pity and resentment in Toffy's mind. A student of character would have seen directly that a woman with more power and strength of mind—a woman with a bit of the bully in herself—who could have taken the upper hand with the big red-faced tyrant, might have made a very fairly good imitation of a gentleman, and perhaps even of a good husband, of Avory. But his wife—timid, and all too gentle—could only wince under the things he said, or let her big eyes suddenly brim over with tears. Toffy began to writhe under the cruel speeches which Avory made to her; he never saw for an instant that there was a fault anywhere save with the husband. She was one of those women who invariably inspire sweeping and contradictory criticisms on the whole of her sex, one man finding in her a proof that all women are angels, and the next discovering as certainly that all women are fools.

Presently Avory left the fishing village on the plea of business and went back to London, leaving his wife and child in the little hotel by the sea. There had followed a whole beautiful sunlit month of peace and quiet for Mrs. Avory, while her little girl played on the sands and she worked and read, or walked and fished with Nigel, and the colour came back to her cheeks, and the vague look of terror left her eyes. And Toffy determined that Mrs. Avory should have a good time for once.

The years between boyhood and manhood had been bridged over by a sense that some one needed his care, and that he was a protection to a little woman who was weak and unhappy. And, whether it was love or not, the thing was honourable and straightforward as an English boy can make it. And then one night by the late post had come a letter from Horace Avory of a kind particularly calculated to wound. Mrs. Avory brought it to Toffy to read out on the sands; and she broke down suddenly and sobbed as though her heart would break; and Toffy to comfort her had told her that he loved her, and meant every word he said, and asked what on earth he could do for her, and said that she must really try not to cry or it would make her ill. He put his arm round the trembling form,—and Mrs. Avory took his hand in hers and clung to it; and then, comforted, she had dried her eyes at last, and gone back to the little hotel again. Toffy saw the whole scene quite plainly before him now. The little whitewashed inn with the hill behind it, the moonlit water of the bay, and the tide coming rolling in across the wet sands. When they met on the following day he told her with boyish chivalry that he would wait for her for years if need were, and that some day they should be happy together.

That had all happened long ago now, and during the years between they had hoped quite openly and candidly that it would all come right some day, although hardly saying even to themselves that the coming right was dependent upon Horace Avory's death.

Meanwhile Mrs. Avory worked hard at her unremunerative tasks, and trimmed parasols and cut out blouses, and worked hopefully, because she knew that it would all come right some day, and because Nigel had said that he loved her. And Nigel wrote regularly to her, and always went to see her on Sunday when he was in London. And every night of his life of late he had dreamed of a girl dressed in rose colour, who had given him her photograph to put on his writing-table.

He read Mrs. Avory's letter again (she wrote probably the worst hand in Christendom), and when he had spelt the ill-formed words once more, he discovered that the blotched and scrawled writing contained a postscript which he had not at first noticed. 'After all, you had better not come here,' it said, 'but I will run down and see you to-morrow. It is far the best and wisest plan, and I must say good-bye. Please expect me by the three o'clock train.' The letter, as usual, had not been posted in time to reach him in the morning, and Toffy realized almost with a sense of disaster that to-morrow was now to-day, and that it was too late to write and expostulate or to suggest to Mrs. Avory how unwise her visit would be. There was nothing for it but to order the motor-car and go to the station to meet her, and afterwards to give her tea in the library, and say to her all the comforting and consoling things he could think of.