Ernest had packed his portmanteau, and ordered a hansom, meaning to take temporary refuge at Number 28 Epsilon Terrace; and he went down again for a few minutes to wait in the breakfast-room, where he saw the ‘Times’ lying casually on the little table by the front window. He took it up, half dreamily, by way of having something to do, and was skimming the telegrams in an unconcerned manner, when his attention was suddenly arrested by the name Le Breton, printed in conspicuous type near the bottom of the third column. He looked closer at the paragraph, and saw that it was headed ‘Accident to British Tourists in Switzerland.’ A strange tremor seized him immediately. Could anything have happened, then, to Herbert? He read the telegram through at once, and found this bald and concise summary before him of the fatal Pontresina accident:—
‘As Mr. H. Oswald, F.R.S., of Oriel College, Oxford, and Mr. Le Breton, Fellow and Bursar of St. Aldate’s College, along with three guides, were making the ascent of the Piz Margatsch, in the Bernina Alps, this morning, one of the party happened to slip near the great gulley known as the Gouffre. Mr. Oswald and two of the guides were precipitated over the edge of the cliff and killed immediately: the breaking of the rope at a critical moment alone saved the lives of Mr. Le Breton and the remaining guide. The bodies have been recovered this evening, and brought back to Pontresina.’
Ernest laid down the paper with a thrill of horror. Poor Edie! How absolutely his own small difficulties with Lord Exmoor faded out of has memory at once in the face of that terrible, irretrievable calamity. Harry dead! The hope and mainstay of the family—the one great pride and glory of all the Oswalds, on whom their whole lives and affections centred, taken from them unexpectedly, without a chance of respite, without a moment’s warning! Worst of all, they would probably learn it, as he did, for the first time by reading it accidentally in the curt language of the daily papers. Pray heaven the shock might not kill poor Edie!
There was only a minute in which to make up his mind, but in that minute Ernest had fully decided what he ought to do, and how to do it. He must go at once down to Calcombe Pomeroy, and try to lighten this great affliction for poor little Edie. Nay, lighten it he could not, but at least he could sympathise with her in it, and that, though little, was still some faint shade better than nothing at all. How fortunate that his difference with the Exmoors allowed him to go that very evening without a moment’s delay. When the hansom arrived at the door, Ernest told the cabman to drive at once to Paddington Station. Almost before he had had time to realise the full meaning of the situation, he had taken a third-class ticket for Calcombe Road, and was rushing out of London by the Plymouth express, in one of the convenient and commodious little wooden horse-boxes which the Great Western Railway Company provide as a wholesome deterrent for economical people minded to save half their fare by going third instead of first or second.
Didcot, Swindon, Bath, Bristol, Exeter, Newton Abbot, all followed one after another, and by the time Ernest had reached Calcombe Road Station he had begun to frame for himself a definite plan of future action. He would stop at the Red Lion Inn that evening, send a telegram from Exeter beforehand to Edie, to say he was coming next day, and find out as much as possible about the way the family had borne the shock before he ventured actually to see them.
The Calcombe omnibus, drawn by two lean and weary horses, toiled its way slowly up the long steep incline for six miles to the Cross Foxes, and then rattled down the opposite slope, steaming and groaning, till it drew up at last with a sudden jerk and a general collapse in front of the old Red Lion Inn in the middle of the High Street. There Ernest put up for the present, having seen by the shutters at the grocer’s shop on his way down that the Oswalds had already heard of Harry’s accident. He had dinner by himself, with a sick heart, in the gloomy, close little coffee-room of the village inn, and after dinner he managed to draw in the landlord in person for a glass of sherry and half an hour’s conversation.
‘Very sad thing, sir, this ‘ere causality in Switzerland,’ said the red-faced landlord, coming round at once to the topic of the day at Calcombe, after a few unimportant preliminary generalities. ‘Young Mr. Oswald, as has been killed, he lived here, sir; leastways his parents do. He was a very promising young gentleman up at Oxford, they do tell me—not much of a judge of horses, I should say, but still, I understand, quite the gentleman for all that. Very sad thing, the causality, sir, for all his family. ‘Pears he was climbing up some of these ‘ere Alps they have over there in them parts, covered with snow from head to foot in the manner of speaking, and there was another gentleman from Oxford with him, a Mr. Le Breton——’
‘My brother,’ Ernest put in, interrupting him; for he thought it best to let the landlord know at once who he was talking to.
‘Oh, your brother, sir!’ said the red-faced landlord, with a gleam of recognition, growing redder and hotter than ever; ‘well, now you mention it, sir, I find I remember your face somehow. No offence, sir, but you’re the young gentleman as come down in the spring to see young Mr. Oswald, aren’t you?’
Ernest nodded assent.
‘Ah, well, sir,’ the landlord went on more freely—for of course all Calcombe had heard long since that Ernest was engaged to Edie Oswald—‘you’re one of the family like, in that case, if I may make bold to say so. Well, sir, this is a shocking trouble for poor old Mr. Oswald, and no mistake. The old gentleman was sort of centred on his son, you see, as the saying is: never thought of nobody else hardly, he didn’t. Old Mr. Oswald, sir, was always a wonderful hand at figgers hisself, and powerful fond of measurements and such kinds of things. I’ve heard tell, indeed, as how he knew more mathematics, and trigononomy, and that, than the rector and the schoolmaster both put together. There’s not one in fifty as knows as much mathematics as he do, I’ll warrant. Well, you see, he brought up this son of his, little Harry as was—I can remember him now, running to and from the school, and figgerin’ away on the slates, doin’ the sums in algemer for the other boys when they went a-mitchin’—he brought him up like a gentleman, as you know very well, sir, and sent him to Oxford College: “to develop his mathematical talents, Mr. Legge,” his father says to me here in this very parlour. What’s the consequence? He develops that boy’s talent sure enough, sir, till he comes to be a Fellow of Oxford College, they tell me, and even admitted into the Royal Society up in London. But this is how he did it, sir: and as you’re a friend of the family like, and want to know all about it, no doubt, I don’t mind tellin’ you on the strict confidential, in the manner of speakin’.’ Here the landlord drew his chair closer, and sipped the last drop in his glass of sherry with a mysterious air of very private and important disclosures. Ernest listened to his roundabout story with painful attention.
‘Well, sir,’ the landlord went on after a short and pensive pause, ‘old Mr. Oswald’s business ain’t never been a prosperous one—though he was such a clover hand at figgers, he never made it remunerative; a bare livin’ for the family, I don’t mind sayin’; and he always spent more’n he ought to ‘a done on Mr. Harry, and on the young lady too, sir, savin’ your presence. So when Mr. Harry was goin’ to Oxford to college, he come to me, and he says to me, “Mr. Legge,” says he, “it’s a very expensive thing sending my boy to the University,” says he, “and I’m going to borrow money to send him with.” “Don’t you go a-doin’ that, Mr. Oswald,” says I; “your business don’t justify you in doin’ it, sir,” says I. For you see, I knowed all the ins and outs of that there business, and I knowed he hadn’t never made more’n enough just to keep things goin’ decent like, as you may say, without any money saved or put by against a emergence. “Yes, I will, Mr. Legge,” says he; “I can trust confidentially in my son’s abilities,” says he; “and I feel confidential he’ll be in a position to repay me before long.” So he borrowed the money on an insurance of Mr. Harry’s life. Mr. Harry he always acted very honourable, sir; he was a perfect gentleman in every way, as YOU know, sir; and he began repayin’ his father the loan as fast as he was able, and I daresay doin’ a great deal for the family, and especially for the young lady, sir, out of his own pocket besides. But he still owed his father a couple of hundred ............