"I'm afraid your friend—your servant—is found, sir," he said.
"You don't mean that he is——"
"I'm afraid it is so, sir. It seems that two Irish reapers, coming from Farmer Matfield's, five mile beyond St. Cross, stumbled against a man lying in a little streamlet under the trees——"
"Under the trees! Where?"
"In the very place where you parted from this Mr. Wilmot, sir."
"Good God! Well?"
"The man was dead, sir; quite dead. They carried him to the Foresters' Arms, sir, as that was the nearest place to where they found him; and there's been a doctor sent for, and a deal of fuss: but the doctor—Mr. Cricklewood, a very respectable gentleman, sir—says that the man had been lying in the water hours and hours, and that the murder had been done hours and hours ago."
"The murder!" cried Henry Dunbar; "but he may not have been murdered! His death may have been accidental. He wandered into the water, perhaps."
"Oh, no, sir; it's not that. He wasn't drowned; for the water where he was found wasn't three foot deep. He had been strangled, sir; strangled with a running-noose of rope; strangled from behind, sir, for the slip-knot was pulled tight at the back of his neck. Mr. Cricklewood the surgeon's in the hall below, if you'd like to see him; and he knows all about it. It seems, from what the two Irishmen say, that the body was dragged into the water by the rope. There was the track of where it had been dragged along the grass. I'm sure, sir, I'm very sorry such an awful thing should have happened to the—the person who attended you here."
Mr. Dunbar had need of sympathy. His white face was turned towards the landlord's, fixed in a blank stare. He had not seemed to listen to the man's account of the crime that had been committed, and yet he had evidently heard everything; for he said presently, in slow, thick accents,—