Peter and Jane; Or, The Missing Heir

by S. Macnaughtan

Miss Abingdon's letter had shown the canon to himself in his true light; before he reached home he had come to believe that it was he who had urged his wife to go to Hulworth. As was usual with him when he felt strongly, he adopted a character rôle, and his handsome face wore a more than usually beneficent and great-minded expression upon it as he walked with his fine erect carriage through the village that night; while it would hardly have required a playbill of dramatis personae to indicate the fact that the canon was living the part of the Vicar of Wakefield in the supreme moment when he visits Olivia in prison. He had promised his wife before leaving to drive over often to see her during her stay at Hulworth; and the following Sunday he preached one of his most memorable sermons on the text—'And when they shall take up some deadly thing it shall not hurt them.'

CHAPTER XI

Mrs. Wrottesley remained at Hulworth until her patient was better, and then the good-hearted canon joined her there for a few days and was altogether charming to poor little Mrs. Avory, who liked him far better than she liked his wife. Toffy went up to London to join Peter Ogilvie and to take ship for Argentine, and Peter went to say good-bye to Jane Erskine.

These two last-named, cheerful people were in a state of acute unhappiness which each was doing his and her best to conceal. It required some pluck to be perfectly even-spirited and to show good mettle in those days. The world contained for them nothing but a sense of parting and uncertainty, and a horrible feeling of disappointment. Their lives were to be severed, perhaps for years, and over all the uncertainty and the thought of separation hung the mystery of Mrs. Ogilvie's half-finished message. The memory of her was clouded by the thought of how much she had suffered, and the conviction intruded itself painfully that, if they had but known more, something might have been done for her. The burden of a secret lies in the sense of loneliness which it brings. A unique experience, dissimilarity of thought or knowledge that is not shared by others, makes a solitude with which no bodily isolation can be compared. Only one person knew—only one person had ever known: that seemed the intolerable thing to the two persons left behind to wonder what the message could mean.

'I sometimes wish she had been a Catholic,' Peter once said. 'It might have been some sort of comfort to her.'

Mrs. Ogilvie was a woman who could remain silent always, and perhaps it was the supreme effort involved by breaking through a lifetime of reserve that, in its added strain upon her heart, had caused her death.

The last few days that the lovers had together were spent in a very loyal and affectionate endeavour to make each other as happy as possible. They made no professions of love or confidence, nor ever dreamed of promising to be true, because they never for a moment could admit the possibility of being anything else; and they did not even promise to write to each other, or to say their prayers at the same time every evening—the difficulty of calculating the difference between Greenwich and local time on a westward voyage put a stop to anything of that sort. Nor did they talk of remembering each other as they looked at the stars; but they spoke of the future and of all the good things it was going to bring, and they even laughed sometimes over imaginary portraits of the brother whom Peter was to seek, and they told each other ridiculous little tales of what he would be like and what he would say and do.

One afternoon Jane gave Peter a gold cigarette case as a parting gift, with his name scrawled in her big handwriting across it; while Peter presented his fiancée with a very handsome diamond ring, and forgot altogether that perhaps he could not pay for it, and went back and told the jeweller so. The jeweller, having known Captain Ogilvie all his life, and being aware that he had lately succeeded to an immense property, thought the young man was joking, and said it did not matter in the least.

Then came the day of parting—drizzly, wet, and depressing—just such a day as people always seem to choose on which to leave England; there was the usual routine of departure; the 'special' from Waterloo, the crowd at the station, the plethora of bags, chairs, and hold-alls; the good-byes, the children held up to the carriage-windows to wave hands, the 'last looks,' and the tears stopped in their flow by anxiety about luggage and missing bags. Then came Southampton, the embarkation, and a sort of enforced cheerfulness and admiration of the ship. Those who had journeyed down to see friends off adopted a congratulatory tone, as though the fact of their having already travelled so far in safety was a sort of assurance that there could be little to fear for the rest of the voyage.