Part 49 (2/2)
MRS. LAMB RETURNS TO PITMUIR
When Mr. Isaac Luker and his client, Mrs. Gregory Lamb, arrived at the small roadside station, in the county of Forfar, towards which they had been journeying throughout the day, they were neither of them in the best of tempers. It had been a long day's journey. There had been some misunderstanding about the connection of the trains at Dundee. They had missed the one by which they had meant to travel; there had been a dreary wait for the next. When at last they started on the last stage of their journey the engine went dawdling along the branch line in a style which both, in their then frame of mind, found equally trying. They would hardly, at any time, have been called a sympathetic couple. Neither, for instance, would have selected the other as an only companion on a desert island. By the time the train paused for, so far as they were concerned, its final stoppage, either would have been almost willing to fly to a desert island to escape the other's society.
It was between nine and ten at night--a misty night. The damp seemed to be rising out of the ground, and to be covering the country with a corpse-like pallor. There was a faint movement in the air, which it did not need a very imaginative mind to compare to a whisper of death. They were the only pa.s.sengers who alighted at the station, which seemed to consist of but a narrow strip of bare earth, about the centre of which was constructed what looked like a ramshackle shed. Illumination was given by two or three oil lamps, and by a lantern which the only visible official carried in his hand. To this personage Mrs. Lamb addressed herself.
”Is any one waiting for me?”
The official proved to be a Scotsman of a peculiarly Scotch type; his manners and his temper were both his own. No attempt is made to reproduce the dialect in which he spoke.
”And who might you happen to be?”
”I'm Mrs. Gregory Lamb.”
”Never heard the name. Pa.s.s out! Tickets!”
Mr. Luker nudged the lady's arm.
”I thought you telegraphed under the name of Mrs. Cuthbert Grahame?”
She made a somewhat ill-considered attempt to correct the error she had made.
”I mean that I'm Mrs. Cuthbert Grahame.”
”Mrs. Cuthbert Grahame? You said just now that you were Mrs.
Gregory Lamb.”
”I spoke without thinking. I telegraphed some instructions to the station-master in the name of Mrs. Cuthbert Grahame.”
”In the name of Mrs. Cuthbert Grahame? A body can't have two names.”
”I ordered a close carriage to meet Mrs. Cuthbert Grahame by the train before this, then, when I found I'd missed it, I sent a wire from Dundee to order the carriage to wait for the next.”
”There's no carriage within miles.”
”No carriage? Then what is there?”
”There's what they call a fly.”
”And is the fly here?”
”Sam Harris wouldn't let it come.”
”Who's Sam Harris?”
”He's the man that owns it.”
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