Peter and Jane Part 28

'The plan will be for you and my lawyer to work together,' said Peter; 'but at present I can't furnish you with the smallest clue as to how these papers came into his possession. I know the look of the box quite well. There were several of them in my mother's writing-room, which was in the oldest part of the house. They were all destroyed one night last autumn when we had rather a serious fire there.'

Dunbar took out his notebook and began to write.

'_By Jove!_' exclaimed Peter, suddenly starting from his seat. He saw it all in a flash: the burning tower, with volumes of smoke rising from it; the line of men, with hose and buckets, pouring water on the connecting bridge of the tower; the groups of frightened guests on the terrace, and his mother standing unmoved amongst them in her sumptuous purple dress and the diamonds in her hair; the arrival of the fire-engine from Sedgwick; and then, just at the end, the figure of a man appearing on the bridge, with a cloak wound round his head, das.h.i.+ng into the doorway through which the smoke was issuing in great waves; his sudden flight across the bridge again; and then Jane, at his elbow, clasping his arm and saying, in a terrified tone, 'Oh, Peter! for a moment I thought it was you!'

Dunbar was scribbling rapidly in his notebook. 'It is as clear as mud!' he said at last. 'Purvis, after the _Rosana_ incident, was missing for a considerable time, and it is believed that his English wife at Rosario hid him somewhere. There he probably heard the story of his adoption, and determined to prove himself the eldest son.'

'I don't understand how he could have heard the story,' said Peter.

'He heard most things. But there are links in the chain that we shall never get a sight of; we see only the beginning and the end of it,'

replied Dunbar.

The Scot was very seldom excited; but he got up from his chair and began to walk rapidly up and down the room, his under-lip stuck out, and his tough hair thrown back from his forehead. 'The whole thing depended upon his getting what direct information he could about the property, and he must have worked this thing well. The fire, I take it, was accidental?'

'Oh, the fire was accidental enough,' said Peter, 'and was found to be due to some electric lighting which was put into the tower.'

'Purvis's visit to England must have been to ascertain if Mrs. Ogilvie were still alive, and, in the first instance, he probably meant to levy blackmail upon her; he must have discovered where she kept her papers, and have tried to effect an entrance on the night of the ball when many strangers were about.'

'I believe,' exclaimed Peter, 'we saw him in one of the corridors of the house during the dance, and decided that he must be one of the guests unknown to us, who had come with some country neighbour, and that he had lost his way amongst the almost interminable pa.s.sages of the place.' He saw himself and Jane making for the leather-covered door which led to the bridge, and the shrinking stranger, with his hopelessly timid manner, who had drawn back at their approach; and he thought he heard himself saying, 'Shall I get him some partners, or leave the people who brought him to the dance to look after him?' It was only a fleeting look that he had caught of the man's face, and he recalled it with difficulty now, but it was not a far-fetched conclusion to decide that the two were one and the same man.

Dunbar was in a sort of transport. 'It's the best case I ever had,' he said, 'and we only want the man himself to make the thing complete!

Purvis has played some pretty clever and some pretty deep games in his time; but this is about the coolest thing he ever tried to pull off, and he has as nearly as possible won through with it.'

Mr. Dunbar always relapsed into a strong Scottish accent in moments of excitement, and he became almost unintelligible at last, as he rolled forth his r's and gave it as his opinion that the man was a worthless scoundrel.

'I can't think,' said Peter, 'why Purvis did not claim the inheritance sooner. He had the whole thing in his hands.'

'Yes; but Purvis did not know that!' exclaimed Dunbar. 'I 'll take my oath he 's been pumping you about how much old servants knew, and the like; and there are men working the case in England, judging by the number of telegrams he has had. He would have been over in London before many months were gone, or I am very much mistaken, and as soon as the train was laid; but it would have been a fatal thing for him to have attempted a case before he knew how much was known. Your arrival in Argentine probably precipitated the very thing he was working for.'

'He remarkably nearly succeeded,' said Peter.

'There ought to be a training home for criminals,' Dunbar exclaimed, 'to teach them once and for all to destroy all evidence, rather than retain that which incriminates alongside of that which may be useful.

A man will sometimes keep a bundle of letters which will bring him to the gallows together with information which might make his fortune.'

Peter described how he had found the tin case on the top of a bundle of shavings in the cabin of the river steamer. 'He was in a tight place there, and must have known it,' said Peter. 'Why not have burned the letters before our boat got up?'

Dunbar laughed. 'You can't very well make a holocaust on a small steamer on a dark night without showing where you are, for one thing,'

he replied, 'nor can you overturn a paraffin lamp on the top of a bundle of shavings without a possibility of burning yourself up at the same time. There was a love of sensationalism, too, about the man. He would like his steamer to flame away at the right moment, and disappoint the men who meant to board her; or, what is still more likely, there was a considerable amount of gunpowder on board the boat, and a boarding-party arriving at the right moment would have been blown sky-high.'

'He never showed mercy,' said Peter.

'The Lord will need to have mercy upon him if he gets into my hands,'

quoth Dunbar, 'for I have none to spare for him.'

'But I,' said Peter, 'have got to remember that my mother charges me to befriend the man.'

'But then,' said Dunbar tersely, 'your mother never knew what sort of man you would have to deal with.'

'G.o.d knows!' said Peter.

'Well, it's a hanging matter if we get him,' said Dunbar cheerfully.

He and the commissario had their orders, and they would be obliged to execute them. The results must be left for a court of justice to decide.

They rode away the following morning, and there seemed nothing for it but to wait at the estancia until more news was forthcoming. For Peter the days were the saddest of his life, and left an impression upon him which nothing ever quite removed afterwards. He became older suddenly, and a certain boyishness, which was characteristic of him, was gone and never returned again. Life, which had once seemed so simple to him and so easily lived, so full of pleasures and of good times and of good comrades, had suddenly become complex and filled with difficulties, and made up of grave decisions and shadowed by a sorrow which would probably be felt as long as he lived. Ross would not let him stay indoors, and mercifully gave him a double share of work to do. The weather was cooler now, and the days could be filled with outdoor occupation from morning till night. There were no siestas in the afternoon or lazy dawdling over afternoon coffee in the heat of the day to remind him of long gossips with Toffy, and the evenings were shorter and not so difficult to fill.

'I 'm an awful bore, Ross!' said Peter, having sat silent from dinner-time until he went to bed one night; 'but I can't help it.'

'I know you can't,' said Ross kindly.

The big man, who was a poor player of cards at the best of times, became seized with a desire to learn picquet, and, strange as his method of consolation may have been, Peter knew what the good fellow meant by it, and taught him the game and got through the time somehow.

There was still no news of Purvis; the man seemed to have vanished in his own mysterious way, and nothing could be heard of him. It was ascertained that he was well supplied with money, and it was thought that, as his child would be incapable of any very long journeys or unusual hards.h.i.+ps, the discovery of his whereabouts near home might lead to the discovery of the father. But the thing remained a mystery.

Dunbar's long lean frame grew leaner 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 a.s.sert 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 nouris.h.i.+ng 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 companions.h.i.+p, 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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.