“It’s not good-bye,” he said. “But I don’t wonder; look here!” and he held out to me a small volume, whose appearance was quite familiar to me, if its contents were less so. As I noted in an early chapter, Davies’s library, excluding tide-tables, “pilots”, etc., was limited to two classes of books, those on naval warfare, and those on his own hobby, cruising in small yachts. He had six or seven of the latter, including Knight’s Falcon in the Baltic, Cowper’s Sailing Tours, Macmullen’s Down Channel, and other less known stories of adventurous travel. I had scarcely done more than look into some of them at off-moments, for our life had left no leisure for reading. This particular volume was—no, I had better not describe it too fully; but I will say that it was old and unpretentious, bound in cheap cloth of a rather antiquated style, with a title which showed it to be a guide for yachtsmen to a certain British estuary. A white label partly scratched away bore the legend “3d.” I had glanced at it once or twice with no special interest.
“Well?” I said, turning over some yellow pages.
“Dollmann!” cried Davies. “Dollmann wrote it.” I turned to the title-page, and read: “By Lieut. X——, R.N.” The name itself conveyed nothing to me, but I began to understand. Davies went on: “The name’s on the back, too—and I’m certain it’s the last she looked at.”
“But how do you know?”
“And there’s the man himself. Ass that I am not to have seen it before! Look at the frontispiece.”
It was a sorry piece of illustration of the old-fashioned sort, lacking definition and finish, but effective notwithstanding; for it was evidently the reproduction, though a cheap and imperfect process, of a photograph. It represented a small yacht at anchor below some woods, with the owner standing on deck in his shirt sleeves: a well-knit, powerful man, young, of middle height, clean-shaved. There appeared to be nothing remarkable about the face; the portrait being on too small a scale, and the expression, such as it was, being of the fixed “photographic” character.
“How do you know him? You said he was fifty, with a greyish beard.”
“By the shape of his head; that hasn’t changed. Look how it widens at the top, and then flattens—sort of wedge shaped—with a high, steep forehead; you’d hardly notice it in that” (the points were not very noticeable, but I saw what Davies meant). “The height and figure are right, too; and the dates are about right. Look at the bottom.”
Underneath the picture was the name of a yacht and a date. The publisher’s date on the title-page was the same.
“Sixteen years ago,” said Davies. “He looks thirty odd in that, doesn’t he? And fifty now.”