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.