Part 10 (1/2)

'May I read it?' said Jane.

'Yes, if you will,' he replied.

Afterwards they could tell every word of the unfinished letter by heart; but at the first reading the words seemed merely to puzzle Jane Erskine, and conveyed very little sense to her.

'When you get this letter I shall be dead,' wrote the woman who had meant to live for many years, 'and before I die I think there is something which I had better tell you. I am not haunted by remorse nor indulging in a deathbed 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 after your father's death. He did not die----'

'There must be something more,' said Jane. She turned the page this way and that, as though to read some writing not decipherable by other eyes.

'I 've looked everywhere,' said Peter; 'there 's nothing more.

Besides, you see, she stops in the middle of a sheet of notepaper. Why should she have written anything else on another piece?'

They read the letter again together, scanning the words line by line.

'What can it mean?' she said at last.

'I have evidently got an elder brother,' said Peter briefly, 'to whom everything belongs. Most people remember that my mother took a curious antipathy to the other little chap when I was born. I can't make it out in any possible way--no one can, of course. But it seems pretty plain that no will can be proved, nor can I touch anything, until my brother is known to be either dead or alive.'

'What can we do?' said Jane. Their two hands were locked together, and the trouble was the trouble of both.

'I can go out to Spain, where he is supposed to have died,' said Peter, 'and make inquiries.'

'I want to ask you something,' said Jane, after a pause. 'Let us be married quietly, first of all, and then we can do everything together.'

'I 'm probably a pauper,' he said simply, 'without the right to a single stone of Bowshott. I went fully into my father's will with the lawyer last night, and he leaves nearly everything to the eldest son.'

'Dear Peter!' protested Jane, accepting Peter's statement, but brus.h.i.+ng aside its purport.

They talked on far into the morning, at one time half distrusting the evidence of their eyes which read the letter, at another looking far into the future to try to pierce the veil of darkness that at present shrouded it. Then, for there were many things to do, the young man turned his face homeward again, and Jane sat on alone in the garden, looking with eyes that hardly were conscious of seeing what they rested on, while the wet branches of the beech trees rocked themselves together, and the tearful autumn suns.h.i.+ne flickered on the disordered beds of mignonette. She sat there until the stable clock struck one, then rose and went indoors. One important decision had been made.

They would be married quietly on the day Mrs. Ogilvie had fixed for the wedding; and then together they would seek the brother who, if he were still alive, would be brother to them both.

But the Court of Chancery took that reasonable view of the case which, as it frequently happens, is directly opposed to the view-sentimental.

The Court of Chancery, in fact, refused to sanction the marriage of a minor with a man without settled prospects, and one whose position in the world was not confirmed by the possession either of money or of lands. At the age of twenty-five Miss Erskine might do as she liked; until then the Court of Chancery decided that she should divide her time each year between her two guardians, with whom she had always lived. No protests were of any avail, and wise relations and friends were agreed in thinking that it was better to postpone the marriage, at least for a time.

The autumn pa.s.sed miserably. Peter went to Juarez first of all, and proved to be substantially true what at first he had supposed might have been the disordered fancy of a sick woman's mind. There was no record of the death of Edward Ogilvie, nor did any entry in registers show the name of an English child in the year when he was supposed to have died. No little grave in the cemetery marked his resting-place.

One fact, at least, seemed established, and that was that Peter's elder brother had not died in infancy at Juarez.

Not much more than this could be proved, and Peter returned home to find that for the present nothing was legally his. Pending inquiries Bowshott was closed. Those who were in ignorance of the real state of affairs talked glibly of enormous death-duties which had crippled, for a time, even the immense Ogilvie estates, and had rendered it necessary for Peter to shut up the house and live economically. The countryside, which called itself gay, met at many little parties and talked charitably of the woman who was gone, saying, with an unconscious sense of patronage, that they had always liked Mrs. Ogilvie in spite of her faults. Death, the great leveller, had brought their unapproachable neighbour nearer to them; they were not afraid of her now. It was strange to think that she was really less than one of themselves in the cold isolation and the pathetic impotence of the grave. They could hardly picture her yet as a powerless thing--the keen, narrowing eyes closed, the sharp-edged poniard of her speech for ever sheathed.

Meanwhile, papers were examined, and every box and chest which contained written matter was searched for a clue to the missing child.

Peter was engaged in long consultations with detectives, and lawyers were running up goodly bills, and British Consuls were making investigations abroad. A whole train of inquiries was set in motion, and pens and tongues were busy. The powerful hand of the law stretched itself out in secret to this country and to that, only to be met with a baffling failure to hold or to discover anything. Money was spent lavishly, and great brains tried to solve the mystery; and Mrs. Ogilvie lay in her grave in a silence that could not be broken, her hand, which had traced the few lines on one sheet of notepaper, cold and still for ever.

CHAPTER VIII

When Peter came back from Spain he came to an empty house. The big reception rooms at Bowshott were swathed in brown holland and dust-sheets, pictures were covered and carpets rolled up, giving an air of desolation to the place. The flowers in the formal gardens had all been dug up, and the carefully tended designs--so like a st.i.tchwork pattern--had lost their mosaic of colour, leaving merely a careful drawing of brown upon green. The banks of flowering exotics, which his mother had loved to have in her drawing-rooms, had been removed to the greenhouses and conservatories. The sight of the gardeners mowing, for the last time in the season, the hundred-year-old turf of the lawn conveyed a suggestion of regret with it; the old pony harnessed to the mowing machine stepped sedately and quietly in his boots on the close, fine gra.s.s. Everything about Bowshott looked stately and beautiful in the clean, sharp air of the morning, when Peter drove up to the entrance after a long night journey and ascended the flight of steps leading to the hall door.

His return to the inheritance which had been indisputably his since he was a little boy had a horrible feeling of unreality about it. Half a dozen times in the course of the morning he had to check himself when he found his thoughts wandering to alterations or improvements, and to tell himself, with a bewildered feeling, that perhaps he had not a right to a flower in the garden or a chair in the house.

'I can't believe it's not mine,' he said aloud, as he drove up the long avenue from the station in his dog-cart, with one of the famous Bowshott hackneys in the shafts. 'I can't believe it's not mine!'