'Ay!' said the Captain, mysteriously. 'Why so, my lad?'
'Why,' returned Rob, looking about, 'I don't see his shaving tackle. Nor his brushes, Captain. Nor no shirts. Nor yet his shoes.'
As each of these articles was mentioned, Captain Cuttle took particular notice of the corresponding department of the Grinder, lest he should appear to have been in recent use, or should prove to be in present possession thereof. But Rob had no occasion to shave, was not brushed, and wore the clothes he had on for a long time past, beyond all possibility of a mistake.
'And what should you say,' said the Captain - 'not committing yourself - about his time of sheering off? Hey?'
'Why, I think, Captain,' returned Rob, 'that he must have gone pretty soon after I began to snore.'
'What o'clock was that?' said the Captain, prepared to be very particular about the exact time.
'How can I tell, Captain!' answered Rob. 'I only know that I'm a heavy sleeper at first, and a light one towards morning; and if Mr Gills had come through the shop near daybreak, though ever so much on tiptoe, I'm pretty sure I should have heard him shut the door at all events.
On mature consideration of this evidence, Captain Cuttle began to think that the Instrument-maker must have vanished of his own accord; to which logical conclusion he was assisted by the letter addressed to himself, which, as being undeniably in the old man's handwriting, would seem, with no great forcing, to bear the construction, that he arranged of his own will to go, and so went. The Captain had next to consider where and why? and as there was no way whatsoever that he saw to the solution of the first difficulty, he confined his meditations to the second.
Remembering the old man's curious manner, and the farewell he had taken of him; unaccountably fervent at the time, but quite intelligible now: a terrible apprehension strengthened on the Captain, that, overpowered by his anxieties and regrets for Walter, he had been driven to commit suicide. Unequal to the wear and tear of daily life, as he had often professed himself to be, and shaken as he no doubt was by the uncertainty and deferred hope he had undergone, it seemed no violently strained misgiving, but only too probable.