“What happened?” said Fred. His mouth was so dry he could scarcely speak.
“He must have gone into the sea to take a bath awfu’ early in the morning, before we were up. The wife she thought she heard a cry about four o’clock, and I got up, for she gave me no peace, and looked about and saw nothing. But later there was one came running and said a man’s clo’es were on the sands, close by some rocks—just for all the world as they were that time, ye mind, Mr. D’yell, when your father was lost. I just took to my heels and ran all the way to the sands. And there was his clo’es, sure enough.”
“The man?” Fred gasped again.
“They got him after a bittie, with his hands clasped full of the seaweed, and his knee raised up upon a rock. He must have made a fight, poor gentleman, for his life. Na, I see what you are thinking: it was nae suicide. He had got up his knee upon a bit of rock, and his hands were full of the weeds—nasty slimy unprofitable things.” There was a pause, and the man lowered his voice a little significantly before he said, “I would like much, Mr. Frederick, if you would come down and see him.”
Fred was not able to speak. He shrank more than he could say from this dreadful sight. He shook his head in the impulse of his panic and horror.
“Sir,” said the man, “I’ve known your father, Mr. Robert D’yell, Yalton, man and boy, for more than forty year. If I didna know he had been drowned two years ago I would say yon was him.”
It was with difficulty Fred found his voice: “I think that I know who it was. It was a—near relation.”
“Ah, I can well believe that,” said John Saunderson. He was something of a genealogist himself, as so many people of his class are in country life, and he threw a hasty backward glance over the scions of the house of Yalton, which he had known all his life, and settled within himself that there was no such near relation, no cousin that ever he had heard of. He did not say this, nor his own profound conviction as to the drowned man.
“A man,” said Fred, “that we had thought to be dead—for years. He frightened my mother with the likeness you speak of, and I am afraid he did not get a good reception. Oh, Saunderson, you are sure it was not a suicide?”
“So far as I could judge—no. I am not surprised,” said Saunderson, “that the mistress was terrified. It gave me a kind of a shock. ‘Lord bless me,’ I said, and then I just held my peace, for I would not be one to raise a scandal on the house of Yalton. But my ostler, confound him, has a long tongue.”