The old Squire was waiting for them in the great hall, where they had tea, and Delia, having now recovered her spirits completely, was chatting away as though the matter which had brought her there was but the recollection of a half-faded nightmare—a very note of interest and admiration concerning all she had just seen. Then, imperceptibly to her, they drew her on to talk about herself, and one point in the plain tale of real, plucky, hard work, which had come within her experiences of late, Wagram made a mental note of for future use.
Chapter Fourteen.
The Sea and her Dead.
The old Squire was skimming the morning paper, without much show of interest, however. Of politics he declared himself sick, and there was not much of any interest all round. He felt himself wishing that all newspapers were only issued weekly.
He was about to throw the paper aside when a paragraph caught his eye. It was headed: “A Terrible Tale of the Sea,” and set forth the picking up of an open boat, a small dinghy, in fact, containing three men in the last stage of starvation and exhaustion, survivors—probably the sole survivors—of the passengers and crew of the steamship Carboceer, homeward bound from West Africa. The steamer, according to the narrative of these, had run at full speed ahead on to a huge floating hulk in black midnight, and had gone down in less than five minutes they estimated, and that amid a scene of terrible panic.
“But,” continued the paragraph, “the survivors, consisting of two seamen and a passenger, seem unable to agree as to the cause of the disaster. The sailors pronounce the obstruction to be a derelict, and are emphatic on this point. On the other hand, the passenger, Mr Develin Hunt, is equally positive that he saw at any rate one man on board of it, which points to the possibility of another lamentable catastrophe due to the carelessness of those in charge of a certain type of windjammer in neglecting to show lights.”
The paragraph went on to a little more detail, mainly conjectural, but of this Grantley Wagram took no heed. He had dropped the paper, and sat staring into space, with the look upon his face of a man who has met with a shock, as violent as it is unexpected—as one who had seen an apparition from beyond the grave.
“Develin Hunt!” he repeated. “Good God! it can’t be. Yet—there can’t be two Develin Hunts.”