THERE is something dreadful in the aspect of a room from which its habitual occupant is absent unexpectedly all night. Its good order, its cold whiteness, the unused articles in tidy array, undisturbed by any careless natural movements, strike a chill to the heart. In any case, even when the usual tenant is pleasantly absent, or gone on a visit, there is something ominous in the empty room. It seems to breathe of a time when the familiar person will be gone for ever. And how much more when the beloved occupant has gone mysteriously—absent, lost in the unknown—no one knowing where he has passed the night! Mrs. Dalyell was not a fanciful woman, she was not given to morbid imaginations, but when she glanced into her husband’s dressing-room next morning her heart sank for a moment with this chill, that would not be reasoned away. She did reason it away, however, and recovered her composure. For, after all, what was it?—nothing. A man in active life has a hundred calls upon him. He might be whipped off to London upon some railway business without any warning. The only thing that really troubled her was the absence of that telegram. It was still almost summer weather; nothing to interrupt the working of the telegraph anywhere. Already even she might have had one had he telegraphed from any station on the way up to London. This was the thing which she could not understand.
“No, there is no word,” she said. “I have made up my mind he must have been called off at a moment’s notice to London; but why he didn’t telegraph, I can’t imagine—even from Berwick he might have done it, and I should have had it by this time. I never knew Robert so careless before.”
“Here it is, mother,” cried Alice, rushing in with the famous yellow envelope, the hideous messenger of so much trouble. But when Mrs. Dalyell took it, she flung it back again almost with indignation, and turned upon the girl with a sort of fury.
“Couldn’t you see,” she cried, “that it was for Mr. Wedderburn?” The poor lady had kept her nerves quiet and her imagination suppressed till now. But this felt to her like an injury. She got up from the breakfast-table, and paced about the room, wringing her hands. It had come, but it was not for her! This seemed to put terror into the anxiety, an increase of every involuntary tremor. In the sickness of the disappointment tears came rushing to her eyes. She took Alice by the shoulders and gave her a shake. “Couldn’t you see? you little careless monkey!” Poor Mrs. Dalyell was unjust in the heat of her disappointment. But after a while reason once more resumed its sway. “I am letting it get upon my nerves,” she said with a tremulous laugh, as she came back to the table. Then, with a glance at Mr. Wedderburn’s disturbed face, “It is not by any chance—about Robert?” she cried.
“No—no—I’ve no reason to suppose it is. It’s from my managing clerk. He says: ‘Something requiring your instant attention. Fear bad——’ No—no—no reason in the world to suppose that D’yell has anything to do with it. I must just hurry away. I’m called upon often, you know,” he added with a sickly explanatory smile, “on urgent—personal affairs.”
“Oh yes,” said Mrs. Dalyell, “we know that well; and no better or kinder counsellor. But you have had no breakfast——”
“I must not stop a moment longer—there is just time for the early train.”
The girls caught their hats from the stand in the hall and ran down with him, Alice speeding on in front like a greyhound to bid the station-master keep back the train for a minute—a kindly arrangement which often was made for the convenience of Yalton. Mr. Wedderburn gave forth a few breathless instructions to Susie as he hurried along. “If I were you I would send over for Fred. He should be at home in the circumstances: and don’t let your mother be troubled.”
“But, dear Mr. Wedderburn, what are the circumstances?” said Susie. “Is there anything wrong with papa?”
“I hope not, my dear, I hope not. I’ve no reason to think that there is anything wrong: but just—I would have Fred at home as early as possible. And if I hear anything in town, I’ll send you word directly. And you may calculate on seeing me before dinner. Then we’ll know what to think.”
“I hope papa will be home before then: and he’ll laugh at us cardiatically.”
“Susie, my dear—there’s no such word.”
“Oh yes, Mr. Wedderburn, for cardiac means from the heart; and that’s the only way it will go.”
He turned round upon her, and smiled with the strangest mixture of fatherly kindness and pity and sorrow. Susie was silenced by this strange look. Her eyes were startled with a sudden anxious question, her soft lips dropped apart with fear and wonder. “Oh, why are you so sorry for me, Mr. Wedderburn?” she cried. But they were just arriving at the railway, and the train was waiting. Susie, with her young sister clinging to her arm, both a little breathless with their run, in their light morning dresses and careless garden hats, the rose of morning health and brightness in their soft, shaded faces, the morning sun shining upon them and round them, distinguishing them upon the rustic platform by the soft little shadow they threw, was a sight the good lawyer never forgot. “The innocent things!” he said to himself.
When he was safe from their eyes, whirling along over the country, he took once more the telegram from his pocket: “Something requiring your immediate attention. Fear bad news. Sent for last night. Too late to communicate, please lose no time.” Well! after all, there was nothing in that to indicate Bob D’yell. It might be Mrs. Davidson’s business. It might be that scapegrace young Faulkner again. The devil fly away with all young spendthrifts! To give an honest man a fright like this for him! Mr. Wedderburn, with a momentary relief, noted, a gleam of fun coming into his eyes, two superfluous words in the telegram: “‘Please’—the blockhead! What man in his senses says ‘please’ when he has to pay a ha’penny for it?” he said with a little hoarse laugh to himself. For surely it must be young Faulkner—the born fool! There was absolutely nothing to connect it with Bob D’yell.
When he entered his office, however, he was met with a very grave face by his managing clerk. “It was a man from Musselburgh, sir, last night. He came to the office, and finding it shut, as it naturally would be at that hour, came on to me at my house. You know, sir, I live out at Morningside——”
“It would be strange if I did not know where you live—get on, man, get on!”
“I say that to account for it being so late. Well, sir, he told me—if it was Musselburgh or if it was Portobello, I can’t quite say, but it’s written down, and I sent off young Gibson by skreigh of day to make inquiries. He told me, sir, that a heap of clothes had been found on the sands belonging to somebody, it would seem, that was bathing in the sea. They lay there all the afternoon and no one took any notice, but at last one of the fisherwomen getting bait came in and said it was a gentleman’s clothes, and his watch and all lying. And the things were examined, and in the pockets were a number of letters——”
Mr. Wedderburn gave a gasp, inarticulate but impatient, with a vehement wave of his hand. The clerk handed him, with a look of deep commiseration and sympathy which filled the lawyer with sudden rage, a little packet on the table.
Ah!—had he not known it all the time?
He sank into a chair, speechless for the moment, but half with rage at Martin standing there gently shaking his head, with the look that a sympathetic acquaintance wears at a funeral—as if it were anything to him! “Robert Dalyell, Esq., Yalton,” the familiar commonplace address, that meant nothing except the merest everyday necessity—that meant a whole tragedy now.
“Found lying on the sands. But was that all—was that all? For God’s sake, man, speak out, whatever you have to say.”
Martin excused Mr. Wedderburn’s hastiness with a slight wave of his hand, and said all there was to say. It was very little: Mr. Dalyell, a man very well known, had been seen to arrive at the station, and had been met by various people on his way to the sea. He was not in the habit of using the bathing machines, as indeed few gentlemen were. There was no special danger about the spot, and it was a calm day, and he was a good swimmer. Of course the place was a little out of the way, and east of the sands, as was indispensable when gentlemen bathed without any machine; but nothing out of the ordinary—many men did the same, and Mr. Dalyell did it constantly. No cry of distress had been heard, nor any other signs of a catastrophe. This little mound of clothes, flung down with the conviction of perfect security, the watch in the pocket, a shilling or two dropped on the sands as the things were moved—this was all. “The body,” Martin said, dropping his already subdued voice, “had not been found.”
The body! Surely it was premature still to talk of that.
“He might have been carried along by the current further east and got to land there.”
“A naked man, sir—without any clothes! There would soon have been word of such a wonder as that—and somebody sent on for the things. We took all that into consideration.”
“I must go down myself at once,” said the lawyer.
“I sent Gibson, sir, the first thing.”
“What’s Gibson to me?” said Mr. Wedderburn, with a sort of roar of trouble, anger, and misery combined. “I must go myself.”
“There are a number of letters,” said Martin, “that might want answering.”
“Letters! when Bob Dalyell’s lying somewhere dead or dying.”
“Oh, sir,” said Martin, “in the midst of life we are in death. If it’s poor Mr. D’yell—and there’s no reasonable doubt on the subject—he’s dead long, long before now.”
Wedderburn made a dash through the air with his clenched fist, as if he had been knocking down a too sympathetic clerk, and took his hat, and darted away.
“Old Pat’s in one of his grandest tempers,” a young clerk permitted himself to say in Mr. Martin’s hearing, as the door closed with a violent swing behind their employer.
“Old Pat!—if it’s our respected superior, Mr. Wedderburn, that ye mean by that familiar no to say contemptuous epithet,” said Mr. Martin—“he has just heard of the loss of his dearest friend. You would do better to feel for him than to mock at a good man in trouble, my young friend.”
Mr. Wedderburn rushed to Portobello as fast as the train would take him, following in the track of his young clerk, who had already exhausted every means of information, but who fortunately met the lawyer on the way and gave him the result of his inquiries. These inquiries seemed to leave no doubt as to the catastrophe, and Wedderburn found to his horror that it was already very generally known, and that there had been a paragraph on the subject in the Scotsman, fortunately not giving the name of the sufferer, but indicating the general fear that a well-known member of society had been the victim. “They never read the papers,” Mr. Wedderburn said to himself, “and she would never think it was—him” (already it seemed too familiar to say Bob). When some one came hurrying up to him, grasping his hand and asking, “Is this awful news true?—is it out of doubt that it’s poor D’yell?”—the broken-hearted man felt once more fiercely angry at the question, as if it was not a thing to be discussed in ordinary words. But this was morbid, he knew. The questioner was Mr. Scrymgeour, Fred’s host, the giver of the ball on the previous night, who explained that he had seen the paragraph in the papers, and had secured it at once and come in to Edinburgh to inquire, that the poor boy should hear nothing till he could ascertain if it were true. And even while he spoke, others came pressing upon them with grave faces: “Was it true? Could it be D’yell?” The sensation was extraordinary. “He was said to be a little shaky in business matters,” said one. “That was all rubbish,” said another. “A man with a good estate at his back and plenty of friends—no fear but he would have pulled through.” “And Chili stock is looking up again, which was supposed to be his danger.” Thus they stood and talked him over. “I suppose there is no doubt it was an accident?” said another cautiously. This remark caught the lawyer’s anxious ear, upon whose own heart a heavy cloud of dread was hanging. But there was a chorus (thank God!) of assurances. No, no!—Bob D’yell was the best fellow in the world. He was a man always confident in his own mind, a man that had every inducement to live—with a fine family, his son at Oxford, with a good estate behind him, and an excellent character and plenty of friends. Even if there might be a little temporary embarrassment—that would soon have blown over. There were men that would have stuck by him through thick and thin. “Me, for instance,” said Mr. Wedderburn, careless of grammar. “I went out especially last night to tell him, if there really was trouble, I would see him through it——” “Poor fellow! Poor Bob! Poor D’yell!” the bystanders said in their various tones. Nobody had the faintest hope that he could have escaped. Such a prodigy as a man without clothes would soon have been known along the coast. And of course he would have hurried back, if he had been saved, to ease the anxieties of his friends. It was only Mr. Wedderburn who insisted upon every means being taken to secure the poor remains, and that not for certainty of the fact, but for decent burial. There is no coroner’s inquest in Scotland; but an inquiry into all the circumstances was immediately set on foot, an inquiry at first in which there was no certain evidence but the piteous heap of clothes, the respectable garments in which every man of business goes to town. The papers left in the pocket, the few shillings on the sands, the notes in his pocket-book, were all so many unconscious witnesses to the accident, all proving how accidental, how unlooked-for, was this cutting short of his career. There was even a withered rose in his coat, a pale China rose from one corner of the terrace at Yalton, which Mr. Wedderburn recognised with a pang, as if it had been one of the children. The tears blinded the middle-aged lawyer’s eyes as he took this faded thing out of his friend’s coat, brushed off the sand from the withered leaves, and put it in his pocket-book reverently. All who were present looked on at this little incident as if it had been a religious rite.
It may be added here that the naked remains of a drowned man were found a few weeks afterwards on the east sands of Portobello. Needless to say that they were quite unrecognisable; but the height and size, and the absence of clothing, made it as nearly certain as any such thing could be that this was all that remained of Robert Dalyell.
Meanwhile that fatal day passed over at Yalton, the first part very quietly, as usual, in the ordinary occupations of the household. It was a beautiful morning, full of comfort and good hope, and Mrs. Dalyell was busy in her house. It was the day for the overseeing and paying of the weekly bills, and there were various repairs necessary before the winter set in which she had to look after, and a great deal of linen—napery as she called it—had come in from the laundry, which it was essential to examine to see what wanted renewing and what it would be possible to darn and keep in use. Old Janet Macalister was famous for her darning. Old as she was, it was still, Mrs. Dalyell said, “a pleasure to see” her work. It was an ornament to the tablecloths rather than a blemish. Old Janet was in great activity, almost agitation. She appeared in the house, as she very rarely did, and talked so much in an excited way, that the servants thought her “fey.” She went with Mrs. Dalyell to the housekeeper’s room, uninvited, to examine the linen. “Dinna put that away. I can darn that fine,” old Janet said to many articles over which her mistress shook her head. “Losh! what’s the good o’ me, eatin’ bread and burnin’ fire this mony mony a year, if I canna keep the napery in order!” she cried. Her head, which was slightly palsied, nodded more than usual, her large pale hands shook; but her voice was strong, and she ended every sentence with a harsh laugh.
“I am afraid you are not very well to-day, Janet,” said Mrs. Dalyell.
“Oh, ’deed am I, very well; but ye must give me work, mistress, ye must give me work. Without work there are o’er many thoughts in a person’s head for comfort. And that fine darning, it just takes everything out of ye: it takes up baith body and mind.”
When her survey of the linen was over, Mrs. Dalyell came back to the drawing-room, having sent old Janet back to her room with an armful of sheets and tablecloths. And she was glad to escape from the old woman. There was a gleam in her eyes, often fixed upon her mistress with a penetrating look, as if she knew something, and her unusual flurry of speech and the harsh laugh of agitation which occurred so often, which Mrs. Dalyell did not understand, and which alarmed her—she could not tell why. Then came luncheon, to which she sat down with her girls, with a forlorn sense of the two empty seats which Foggo had placed as usual. “I thought, mem,” he said in his solemn way, “that Mr. Fred would have been home, if not the maister.”
“Why should you think Mr. Fred would have been at home?” she asked almost angrily.
“He is coming in the afternoon with some of the young people from Westwood for tea. We shall want tea on the terrace at half-past four, and there will probably be five or six people.”
“Very well, mem,” said Foggo, more solemn than ever, and with a look which, like Janet’s, meant more than his words.
Mrs. Dalyell had something like an attaque des nerfs, which was a malady unknown to her. She could not eat anything. In order that the servants might not suppose there was anything irregular in their master’s proceedings, she said nothing before Foggo about her anxiety. She said she was tired, looking over all that weary linen. “And old Janet, that was stranger than ever, and she always was a strange creature. I think I will lie down for a little after lunch. And I almost wish that I had not bidden Fred to bring over the Scrymgeours with him for the afternoon.” If this was said to throw dust in Foggo’s eyes, Mrs. Dalyell might have spared herself the trouble. For Foggo had read his Scotsman that morning, and had heard a murmur of dismay which had come to Yalton by the backstairs, by the kitchen—nobody knew how. “God help the poor woman!” Foggo said, when he retired to his own domain, with more feeling than respect. “She’s full of trouble, but she will not let on, and though she’s in horror of something, it’s not half so bad as what has come to pass.”
“If that story’s true,” said the cook, who was too much disturbed and too anxious to hear everything to take any trouble about her own work, which the kitchen-maid was accomplishing sadly while her principal talked and cried over the dreadful rumour which had swept hither on the wings of the wind. “Oh, it’s true enough,” said Foggo, whose disposition was dismal—“and there’s little dinner will be wanted here this night, for sooner or later they must hear. It was more than I could well bear to hear them talking of the big tea on the terrace and who was coming. I hope the Scrymgeour people will not be so mad as to let their young ones come: and nobody else will come, for it’s well known over the country by this time, though she doesn’t know.”
“Oh, my poor bonnie lady,” said the cook weeping—“and the kind maister, that had a pleasant word for everybody.”
“Not so pleasant a word for them that crossed him,” said Foggo. “Not that I would say a word against him, and him a drowned man.”
Early in the afternoon Fred came home. It was a house that stood always with open doors and windows, so that there was no need to open to any familiar comer; but Foggo was in the hall, chiefly because he too was excited and eager to have the first of any news that might arrive, when the youth with his light step came in. His eager question, “Is my father at home?” made the grave butler more solemn than ever.
“No, sir, the master has not been back since he left the house yesterday morning,” said Foggo.
But though his looks were so significant, that the very dogs saw that something was the matter, Fred neither gave nor communicated any news. He rushed upstairs three steps at a time, and burst into the drawing-room, where his mother was sitting. She had tried to lie down, as she had said, but Mrs. Dalyell could not rest: her nerves would not be stilled, and her thoughts grew so many that they buzzed in her ears, and seemed to suffocate her in her throat. She was sitting at the window which commanded the gate, so that she might see who appeared, ever watching for that telegraph boy, who in a moment might set all right.
“You have come back early, Fred,” she said. “And have you come alone?”
“Mother, what’s this I hear, that my father has never come home?”
“Who has told you such a thing? Your father has many affairs in his hands; he’s often been called away in a hurry.”
“You knew then he was going somewhere? It’s all right, then, thank God!” said Fred; “and that dreadful thing in the papers has nothing to do with him.”
“What dreadful thing in the papers?” cried Mrs. Dalyell. It was not till Fred had thus committed himself in his haste and anxiety that he felt how foolish it was to refer to a report which as yet was not authenticated. He went to look for the papers, cursing his own rashness. But Foggo had more sense than might have been supposed. He had conveyed that Scotsman out of the way.
Alas! as if it were of any use to try to stave off the knowledge of such a calamity! An hour later Mr. Wedderburn’s sober step sounded upon the gravel, coming up from the train. Mrs. Dalyell sat still in her chair, not running to meet him as the others did. “Oh, I shall hear it soon enough—I shall hear it soon enough!” she said to herself.
His very step had tragedy in it; and she knew before she saw him that something dreadful had happened, that the failure of that telegram, which Robert had never before omitted to send her, was but too well explained. Something like a sweeping gust of fatal wind seemed to flow through the house—a chill consciousness of coming trouble, calling out everybody from above and below to hear the news. And then there was a terrible cry, and then a dread stillness fell over Yalton—like the stillness before a storm.
There was one strange thing, however, which happened that fatal afternoon, and which Fred could never forget. As he went upstairs to his own room, which was in the upper storey, a pale and miserable ghost of the cheerful youth he had been yesterday, he saw old Janet standing at the end of the passage which led to her room. She put out her long arm, out of the folds of her tartan shawl. “How is she taking it, Mr. Fred?” she asked. Janet’s eyes were deep, and shone with a strange fire. Her face was full of excitement and agitation—but not of grief, although she had been devoted to the master, who was also her nursling. “How is your mother taking it?” There was a gleam of strange curiosity in her eyes.
“Taking it?” cried Fred. “Have you no heart that you ask such a question? My mother is heartbroken—as we all are,” said the lad, his voice giving way to the half-arrested sob, which he was too young to be able to restrain.
“But no me—that’s what you’re thinking: though the Lord knows he’s more to me than everything else in this world. Laddie, you’re young—young; and so is your mother. But me, I’m a very old woman. I’ve seen many a strange thing. You’ll mind that you’re to come and ask me if you’re ever very sore troubled in your mind.”
“You!” cried Fred. There was something like scorn in his tone. The first distress of youth seems always final, insurmountable, so that it is half an insult to suggest that it will be lived through and other troubles come. But then a sudden chill of horror came over the lad. “You!” he said again, with a pang which he did not himself understand. He remembered what his father had said: “Go to old Janet.” Did she know what his father had said? Had she been aware that this great trouble, this more than trouble, this misery, calamity, was coming? Fred gave the old woman an awed and terrified look—and fled: from her and his own thoughts.