I daresay a visit to a fashionable tailor and its subsequent results made me a little more presentable, but I disliked this town of Portsmouth with a healthy dislike, and was glad when my friend took me away.
I had to go to London. The railway amused me, and made me wonder, but used as I was to the quiet of the desert and forest, it deafened me, and the shaking tired me beyond conception.
My solicitor, a prim white-haired man, said he was so glad to see me, though I do believe he was a little afraid of me. Probably not without cause, for at the very moment he was entering into business as he called it, and arranging preliminaries, I was thinking how quickly Otakooma’s savages would rub all the starch out of this respectable citizen. They would not take long to arrange preliminaries with the little man, and as to entering into business, they would do so in a way that would considerably astonish his nerves.
“Bother business!” I exclaimed at last, in a voice that made the prim solicitor almost spring off his chair.
“Oh! my dear sir,” he pleaded, mildly. “We must go into these little matters.”
He ventured to give me two fingers to shake as I left the office with Roberts. I feel sure he was afraid to entrust me with all his hand.
“And as soon as you get home you will telegraph to me; won’t you, Mr Radnor?”
“Telegraph!” I said in astonishment. “Telegraph! and you tell me it is five hundred miles from here to Dunryan. Do you think you can see a fire at that distance? It must be a precious big one I’ll have to light, and the mountains around Dunryan must be amazingly high.”
Both Roberts and the solicitor laughed; they could see that the only idea I had of telegraphing was the building of fires on hill-tops.
I arrived at Dunryan at last—my small patrimony. If I was pleased with it at all, it was simply because it was my own; but everything was so new and so strange and so tame, that as soon as my friend saw me what he called “settled,” and went away to sea and left me, I began, in the most methodical manner possible, to dislike everything round me.