Peter and Jane, Sarah Macnaughtan [read ebook pdf .txt] 📗

to talk to the girl beside him. So the two intruders never entered the room at all; but, as they pursued their way still farther, Peter was thinking about Mrs. Avory, and wishing to goodness that Toffy had never met her.

The big house seemed too full of people for his taste to-night. Every room and corridor was occupied, and Peter said, 'Let's go to my mother's sitting-room. Do you mind, Jane? We can get cool on the bridge.'

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 passage, 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 passage leading to the leather-covered door.

'Who 's that, do you know?' said Peter, when they had passed 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 passed 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 furnishing 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 embarrassing 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 petition, 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 comradeship, a cherished friendship, 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. 'God 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.

Passers-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 analysed 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 flashing diamonds in it, and her long-handled glasses 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