He snatched up the paper again, with something of a tremble as he grasped it, and once more scanned the paragraph. Then he turned eagerly to several other morning dailies which lay on the table. More detail might be set forth in each—but no. Either too hurriedly did he turn over each close-printed sheet, or the item of news had been overlooked, but nothing further could he find concerning the tragedy. At last, stuck away in a corner of a different sheet, he found another paragraph: “The only surviving passenger of this ghastly marine tragedy,” it concluded, “proves to be a West African trader who has spent many years far up country—an elderly gentleman of some sixty years, named Develin Hunt.”
Grantley Wagram’s face lost none of its set greyness.
“Of some sixty years?” he repeated—“that would be about the age. No; he’d be more than that. There can’t be two Develin Hunts! The sea has given up her dead.”
He looked years older as he sat there, still grasping the paper, and for it he had reason; for should his conjectural identification of this man prove an accurate one, why, then, it meant that the ruin of his house would be fixed, and, humanly speaking, beyond his power to avert.
For long he sat, motionless as a stone figure. Through the open window came in the joyous sounds of the summer morning—the rustle of the great elms in a light breeze, the caw of rooks, and the distant clicking of a mowing-machine, and, with all, the scent of flowers upon a groundwork fragrance of new-mown hay. Every nerve and sense was alive to these. No wonder that he should look grey and stony. What if all should end with him?
What if his son—? And then from without came the voice of his son, together with that of another, and both were inquiring as to his whereabouts. The voices from outside acted as a tonic; and, pulling himself together, the old Squire got up and went to meet their owners—his son and the family chaplain. Wagram had been serving the latter’s Mass, and had brought him in to breakfast.
“Looking fit? Oh, well, I suppose so. I haven’t begun to feel my years as yet,” was the easy answer of the old diplomat to the fresh, cheery greeting of the priest. But the latter was not altogether deceived. His keen observational faculty did not fail to detect a certain drawn and anxious look, differing from the ordinarily suave expression of his host’s face. “Wagram, tell Rundle to get us out a bottle or so of that dry, sparkling hock. You know, the 13 bin. I believe that’s better than anything else on a warm morning like this.”
“Upon my word, Squire, you’ve missed you’re vocation,” laughed Father Gayle. “You ought to have been a crack physician, for certainly no one answering to that qualification could have been guilty of a more salutary prescription.”
“Any news?” said Wagram, picking up the paper. Then, as they sat down: “Why, this is a queer yarn, these three chaps being picked up in a boat.” Then, after briefly skimming it: “Why, by George! I wonder if that’s the hulk we were reading about the other day when Haldane was here? I shouldn’t be surprised. It must be very much in the same part of the world.”
“You forget, Wagram,” said the chaplain quizzically, “that so far we none of us know what the mischief it is you are talking about, save that it concerns three men in a boat, a yarn, and Haldane. Now, even in my childhood, I was never good at piecing together puzzles. I can’t answer for the Squire.”