Peter and Jane Part 7

Bowshott is a very old house, so old that, if it had not been for archaeologists, who came there sometimes and read the grey stones as though they had been printed paper, no one would ever have known when the earliest part of it was built. Antiquaries agreed that it dated from Norman days; but the only portion of the building of that period which was standing now was a tower at the eastward end of the house.

It had been almost in ruins at one time, but Colonel Ogilvie's father had restored it, and, with a considerable amount of skill, had connected it with the more modern part of the house by a stone bridge on a single arch. The whole thing was excellently contrived; the archway lent a frame to one of the most beautiful parts of the garden; and the tower, which was entered by a strong oak door from the bridge, now contained three curious, romantic-looking rooms, with quaint, uneven walls six feet thick, deep, narrow windows, and heavy oak ceilings. The largest of the rooms to which admittance was gained by the oak door was Mrs. Ogilvie's sitting-room. She had a curious love of being alone for hours at a time, and she enjoyed the sense of isolation which was afforded her by being cut off from the rest of the building by the stone bridge on its high arch. Here she would spend whole days by herself, reading or writing. Above this room, which was full of her own particular possessions, was a smaller apartment containing a valuable library of philosophical works. Here were muniment-chests, and the large writing-table where she wrote all the business letters relating to the estate; and here it was that she was wont to see her steward and her agent from time to time. No one but Mrs. Ogilvie and her son ever entered the room without some special reason, and it was too far away from the rest of the house for casual visitors to intrude themselves. The short pa.s.sage, within the more modern house, which led to the bridge was reached by a door hung with a leather curtain securely arranged to prevent draughts, and no one ever lifted this curtain except those who had a right to the rooms beyond.

To-night, however, the house was open to all comers, and it afforded no surprise to Captain Ogilvie and his companion, when they had quitted the corridor and the reception-rooms, and had left the guests and servants behind them, to find a man's figure before them in the short pa.s.sage leading to the leather-covered door.

'Who 's that, do you know?' said Peter, when they had pa.s.sed under the curtain and were crossing the bridge.

'I have no idea,' said Jane; 'some stranger, I suppose, whom some one has brought.'

'They don't seem to be looking after him very well,' said Peter, 'leaving him to prowl about alone and get lost in a great barrack like this. I don't suppose I ought to have asked him if he wanted partners, or anything of that sort? Some one is sure to look after him.'

'Oh, sure to!' said Jane, and they pa.s.sed over the bridge together and went into Mrs. Ogilvie's morning-room.

Having arrived there and secured two comfortable chairs, the power of speech seemed suddenly to have deserted two persons whose conversation was never brilliant, but who at least were seldom at a loss for anything to say. It appeared as though Peter Ogilvie had brought Miss Erskine to this distant room for no other purpose than to say to her, in an absent-minded way, 'Is every one enjoying themselves, do you think?'

'I think every one is quite happy,' said Jane, and added, with characteristic frankness, 'I know I am!'

Peter gave her a quick glance, turning his eyes full upon her for a moment as though to read something in the face beside him; then he began with absorbed attention to twist the silk string of his ball programme round and round his finger. The room where they sat was singularly unlike those rose-shaded bowers which are considered suitable to the needs of dancers who pause and rest in them. Its austere furnis.h.i.+ng had something almost solemn and mysterious about it; and the stone walls hung with tapestry, on which quaint figures moved restlessly with the draught from an open window, would have given an eerie feeling to a man, for instance, sitting alone there at twelve o'clock at night. But in the gloom and austerity of the still and distant chamber sat Jane in white satin with pearls about her neck, and the room was illumined by her.

'So you are enjoying yourself,' said Peter at last--Peter who never made fatuous conversational remarks of this sort. The words, for no reason in themselves, fell oddly, and were followed by a silence which was disturbing and made for sudden self-consciousness wholly to be condemned, and to be banished, if possible, directly. Jane, who did not fidget aimlessly with things, began diligently to pluck a long white feather out of her fan, and said in a voice that was deliberately commonplace, 'We ought to go back now, oughtn't we? Let me see who your next partner is, Peter, that I may send you back to dance with her.' She stretched out her hand for the young man's programme.

But Peter sat absorbed, twisting its silk cord round his finger.

'Don't let's go yet,' he said, and the constrained silence fell between them again. 'I want to ask you something, Jane.'

'Yes,' said Jane. Her hands lay idle now in her lap, and she no longer tried to extract the white ostrich feather from her fan.

'I want to know if you think you can care for me a little?'

Probably when a man feels most deeply his utterances are the most commonplace, and an Englishman is proverbially incapable of expressing his feelings. In the supreme moments of their lives, it is true, a few men, and those not always the most sincere, may speak eloquently; but for the most part a proposal of marriage from an Englishman is--as it should be--a clumsy thing. Peter Ogilvie could only speak in such limited language as he always used. Yet the world seemed to stand still for him just then, for he knew that everything in his heaven or upon earth depended on what Jane's answer would be.

'Don't let me bother you,' he said at last, 'or rush you into giving an answer now if you would rather wait.'

Perhaps a declaration of love from an old comrade is the most dear as well as the most embarra.s.sing of all such avowals. A heart which has already given itself in loyalty and affection to another finds that it is not a deepening of this loyalty and affection that is asked, but a complete re-ordering of things. The lover's pet.i.tion, therefore, either comes to the woman as a revelation, betraying to her in a flash that she has loved always, and has merely been calling the thing by another name, or else it finds her impatient at the disturbance of an old comrades.h.i.+p, a cherished friends.h.i.+p, which nothing but this foolish, exacting thing called love could ever shake.

Peter was not versed in introspective questions or hair-splittings; he loved with his whole heart, and he had tried to say so without very much success. Just then he would have given anything he possessed to be endowed with a little more eloquence, though deep down in his heart he had a lingering hope that perhaps Jane would understand. 'It's neck or nothing,' he was saying to himself, in the homely jargon in which he usually formed his thoughts. 'G.o.d knows I may have been a fool to speak.'

'Peter,' began Jane shyly. And Peter ceased twisting the silk cord of the programme round his finger, and they turned and looked at each other.

'Is it true?' he said at last, with a queer kind of wonder in his voice.

'Let us go into the garden,' he said. His instincts remained primitive, and just then this room was too narrow for all he felt, and it seemed to him that the large things of the night and the distant glory of the stars were the only environment that he could bear.

Pa.s.sers-by, had they been mean enough to pause and listen outside the sheltering yew-hedge near which they sat, might have questioned the poetry of their love-making, and have condemned an avowal of devotion punctuated by barbarous slang; but the silence that fell between them was full of tenderness and more easily understood than speech, and perhaps the moon--an inquisitive person at the best of times--as she peeped over the grey turrets of the house saw the dawn of a love as single-hearted and as genuine as many sentiments which have been more carefully a.n.a.lysed and described.

These were two happy, light-hearted persons, without very much to recommend them except a certain straightforwardness of vision which abhorred, as by a natural instinct, circuitous or crooked things, a transparent honesty, and a simple acceptance of those obligations which race and good-breeding demand.

At the present moment, out in the garden on the stone seat set in the embrasure of the high yew-hedge, they were oblivious of everything in the world except each other and the absorbing discovery of love.

They were the last to hear the cry of 'Fire!' which rang out from the house, and they were still sitting undisturbed while men ran with hose and buckets, and a clamour arose in the stable-yard for more water, and a clatter of horses' hoofs could be heard as a groom galloped off for the nearest fire-engine. The yew-hedged garden where they sat was distant a long way from the house, and it was not until a heavy cloud of smoke rose up against the sky that Peter's attention was attracted, and he realized that the Norman tower was on fire.

He started up and ran to the place where grooms and helpers, gardeners and strangers' coachmen, and waiters and guests were standing, with hose and buckets, pouring a ridiculous little stream of water against the burning pile. The fire had begun in the roof, and the smoke was pouring from the narrow windows in the tower. No flames had shot up yet, and the fire-engine from Sedgwick, prompt and well-served as it always was, might be here any minute. The oak roof would burn slowly and the walls were secure, but the tapestry in the lower room was dry and old, and would fire like a bundle of shavings. An effort was made by a body of men to force an entrance into the lower room and save what they could; but they were beaten back by the smoke which came in volumes down the turret staircase and by the flames which now began to shoot up here and there against the darkness of the night. There was nothing for it but to safeguard the main building. The wind was setting towards it from the tower, and a party of men were up on the roof treading out burning sparks and playing water where slates were hottest or ashes might burst into flames.

Mrs. Ogilvie stood on the terrace in her magnificent purple gown, her red hair with flas.h.i.+ng diamonds in it, and her long-handled gla.s.ses held up to her near-sighted eyes.

'So that goes!' she said, shrugging her shoulders. 'Well, it will give me a good deal of trouble. Or is it fate, I wonder?'

Peter was directing a body of men to play water on the bridge; garden and stable hoses were turned full upon it by relays of helpers, and some long ladders were placed against the windows to see if it were possible in that way to effect an entrance and save some of the valuables in the room. The guests--women in light ball dresses and bare shoulders, and men in evening clothes--had surged out on to the terrace, and were watching with that curious mixture of fascination and regret which comes to the eyes of those who see destruction going on and know that they are powerless to prevent it. Every ear was strained to catch the first sound of the fire-engine on the road from Sedgwick, and some twenty or thirty couples, more impatient than the rest, had run to a distant knoll, from whence the road was visible, to peer through the darkness and to see if anything was coming. The stars shone serenely overhead, and the moon was turning the water in the fountains to cascades of silver, while from turret and roof the volumes of grey smoke belched forth, and the ineffectual fire appliances played upon the house.

It was just then that what seemed almost like an apparition appeared upon the bridge. A man, not above medium height, with a cloak hastily thrown about his head to protect him from the smoke, dashed across the bridge, was drenched by the fall of water, and entered the turret room.

People asked each other fearfully whose this strange figure could be.

Many, strangely enough, had not seen it; the sudden dash through the smoke had not occupied a moment of time, and most eyes were directed towards the roof of the building, while others were turned towards the Sedgwick road. Those who had seen cast amazed eyes upon each other, women clutched the persons nearest them, and Jane Erskine, seeking half wildly for some one in the crowd, found Peter and said to him, 'What is it? Who went in there just now? Oh, Peter, for a moment I thought it was you!'

There was a shout of warning, but it was too late for the man, whoever he was, to turn back. He was inside the tower now, and no shouting could hold him. Some prayed as they stood there, murmuring half mechanically, 'Save him! save him!' as instinctively men and women will pray even when the life for which they plead may carry with it such sorrow as they never dreamed of.

Suddenly some young men who had climbed to the top of the knoll gave a shout, and the fire-engine from Sedgwick turned the corner of the road with a fine dash, for Tom Ellis, a good whip, was driving, and the white horse on the near side knew as well as any Christian how to save an inch of the road. The fire-engine, all gleaming with bra.s.s fittings and flaming red paint, clattered to the door, and pulled up with admirable precision on the spot from which a hose could be played.

Eight men in helmets leaped from their seats and got their gear in order with the coolness of blue-jackets in a storm. But for its quietness and its controlled, workmanlike effect, the whole scene had distinctly a dramatic touch about it. Possibly the firemen would have shouted louder had they been upon the boards, and fainting women, it is generally a.s.sumed, give a realistic touch to well-staged melodrama. No doubt the crowd on the terrace at Bowshott would have disappointed an Adelphi audience. But the old white horse stood to attention like a soldier on a field day; and Tom Ellis, wiping his brow as though he himself had run in the shafts all the way from Sedgwick, lent a touch of stage realism to the scene. Nothing could save the interior of the tower--that was past praying for; but a shout went up that there was a man inside, and the firemen threw their ladders against the walls and prepared their scaling-irons and life-saving apparatus. The smoke rolled out in dense volumes now, and through the gloom a voice shouted, 'It 's all right! He 's crossed the bridge again!'

'Oh, are you sure? are you sure?' said Jane, her fear almost amounting to a panic, and it haunted her for long afterwards that perhaps the man had not actually escaped the fire. For nothing was heard of him again, and it was only after Peter had ordered a fruitless search to be made amongst the debris in the tower that she felt satisfied of the stranger's safety.

A newspaper reporter tried to prove that a gallant attempt had been made to save some valuables in the tower, and went so far as to head one of his paragraphs, 'A Gallant Act.' But there was nothing of value in the tower rooms except the old furniture and books and the tapestry on the walls, and these had all been destroyed.

The ruined interior of the tower smouldered the whole of the next day; though the walls still stood, gaunt and grim, windowless and gutted by the fire. But the building was covered by insurance, and even the loss of the tapestries seemed more than compensated by the fact that an absorbing topic of general interest had been provided in a quiet and uneventful neighbourhood.

CHAPTER VII

It was a matter of necessity with Mrs. Ogilvie to purchase a new dress for the wedding. Wherefore, in the week following the night of the ball, she went to London for the day, while builders and carpenters were already at work repairing the ruined tower.

'It will be inconvenient,' she said, 'to go up and see my dressmaker later when the house is full. Is it absolutely inc.u.mbent upon me, as the mother of the bridegroom, to dress in grey satin, or have I sufficiently scandalized my neighbours all my life to be able to wear what I like?'

Usually her maid accompanied her when Mrs. Ogilvie went up to London; but, in her wilful way, she had decided to-day that maids were useless, and that her present maid had round eyes that stared at her from the opposite side of the carriage when they travelled together. In short, Mrs. Ogilvie intended to go to London alone.

She departed with some sort of idea of enjoying the expedition; the purchase of clothes was a real aesthetic pleasure to her, and even the feel of the pavements in the world-forsaken London of September had something friendly about it that spoke to her with an intimacy and a kindliness such as she never experienced among country sights and sounds. A morning at Paquin's revived her as sea breezes revive other women. Lunch followed in a room pleasantly shaded from the sun and decorated with a fair amount of taste. But the food was uneatable, of course; Mrs. Ogilvie could never get a thing to eat that she liked.

It was nearly four o'clock before the brougham which had met her at the station in the morning drew up before a door in deserted Harley Street.

An elderly man-servant showed her into the doctor's waiting-room, and Mrs. Ogilvie sat down and began turning over with interest the pages of a fas.h.i.+on magazine.

'I think I know the worst,' she said to the famous surgeon whom she had come to consult, when he led her into his room. 'What I want to know is, can you put off this tiresome business until after my son's wedding?'

He asked her quietly her reason for the delay. Few people argued with Mrs. Ogilvie; there was an inflexibility about her which made protest impossible. He knew that the case was a hopeless one, but life might certainly be prolonged if she would submit to treatment without delay.

'Why should you put it off?' he said; 'even five or six weeks may make an enormous difference.'

'I always put off disagreeable things,' said Mrs. Ogilvie lightly.

A London doctor probably knows many cases of delicate and sensitive women who will fret over a crumpled rose-leaf and die with the calm courage of a martyr; but the woman who would deliberately throw away her chances of life was unfamiliar to the famous specialist. He looked keenly at his patient for a moment out of his deep eyes.

'I have never known a case of this sort in which there was not an immediate effort at concealment,' he said to himself; 'and women conceal most of their sicknesses as if they were crimes.' Aloud he asked her what was the earliest date at which she could put herself into his hands.