Peter and Jane by Sarah Macnaughtan (large screen ebook reader .txt) 📖

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.

CHAPTER XVII

Peter and Jane were married the following autumn with the ring which Toffy had kept wrapped up in a piece of tissue paper in his waistcoat pocket.

For a description of the general rejoicings the almost hysterical paragraphs in the Culversham local paper must be consulted. Columns of print were devoted to accounts of feastings and fireworks, tenants' dinners, and school-children's teas.

In order to understand and really appreciate the full interest of the occasion one would have had to be at Tetley Place on the morning of the 26th of October last year. Miss Abingdon was in her most bustling, her most uncompromising mood, and from an early hour of the morning she was so severe in her speech, and so absolutely radiant in her expression, that it was very difficult indeed to know how to treat her.

Canon Wrottesley, who still believed that his wife was only feeling the effects of the winter weather, the spring weather, the summer weather, or the autumn weather, was as gay and debonair as usual, and even at the wedding it was felt that he was in some sort the centre of things. He had his usual group of admirers about him, and was so gracious and charming, so patriarchal one moment and so boyish the next, that his popularity was not to be wondered at. The very school-children, as they threw their flowers, glanced upwards at the canon for his approval.

Mrs. Avory, dressed in black, went very quietly to the wedding with her little girl beside her. She wept sadly during the service, but she looked stronger now, and less suffering than she had been wont to do. A niche seemed to have been found for her in the village of Culversham, where she loved the poor people, and went about amongst the cottages, and read to sick folk, and was happier, perhaps, than she quite knew, in her own pathetic little way.

Kitty Sherard was bridesmaid and never cried at all. She wore rose-colour, and carried Jane's bouquet, and during the whole of the long day she smiled and was admired, and behaved as a bridesmaid in rose-colour should. It is a comforting supposition, which many people hold as a belief, that there are guardian angels, or spirits, which watch round the beds of those who weep. Such a spirit, keeping watch at Kitty Sherard's bed that night, and hearing her sobbing, may have known something of her sorrow. Soldiers—men tell us who have seen many battlefields—cover their faces when they are wounded,