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.