There was no mention of Count von Kerber, which added a ripple to the wave of astonishment in Royson's breast. He took his baggage to Charing Cross in a cab, and deposited it there. Meanwhile, he learned from a further scrutiny of the list that his own few belongings were hardly wanted. He had not been so well equipped since he left Heidelberg to rush to his mother's death-bed. Nevertheless, having already gathered in a valise some books, photographs, letters, and other odds and ends, he went to Brixton to obtain them.
While giving a farewell glance around his dingy room, an old envelope, thrown aside overnight, reminded him of a half-formed idea, which appealed to him strongly now that he knew his port of departure.
So he wrote a short letter:
Dear Mr. Forbes:
"You were kind to me four years ago, as kind as Sir Henry Royson would permit you to be towards one who had wilfully and irreparably insulted him. My feelings with regard to him have undergone no change. He may be dead, for all I know, or care. But you, I suppose, are still the trusted solicitor of the Cuddesham estate, and Sir Henry Royson, if alive, may have remained unmarried. In that event, I am heir to a barren title, and it may save you some trouble if I inform you that I am leaving England. For reasons of no consequence, I am passing under the name of Richard King. If I return, or settle down in some other land, I will write to you, say, after the lapse of a year. Please regard this note as strictly private, and do not interpret it as foreshadowing any attempt on my part to arrive at a reconciliation with Sir Henry Royson."
He was about to add the briefest announcement of his new career, but he checked himself; had not von Kerber forbidden the giving of any information?
He signed the letter, and addressed it to the senior partner of a firm of solicitors in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Then, indeed, he felt that he had snapped the last slender link that bound him to the dull life of the city. Like Kent, he vowed that "freedom lies hence, and banishment is here." And he had always hated Brixton, which was unjust to that pleasant suburb, but the days of his sojourn there had been days of bondage.
He was among the first to secure a seat in the Continental mail. Having registered those superb trunks through to Marseilles, and reserved a comfortable corner by depositing his valise there, he strolled up and down the platform, and quietly scrutinized his fellow passengers. So far as he could judge, none of the earlier arrivals were prospective shipmates. Two bronzed men, of free gait, with that trick of carrying the hands back to front which singles out the sailor from the rest of humanity, drew him like a lodestone. But he soon discovered that they were P. & O. officers, bidding farewell to a friend bound for Egypt.
At last he came upon a man and a woman, a remarkable pair under any circumstances, but specially interesting to him, seeing that the man gripped an ancient carpet bag on which was pasted a label with the glaring superscription: "Captain John Stump, yacht Aphrodite, Marsails." The address was half written, half printed, and the quaintly phonetic spelling of the concluding word betrayed a rugged independence of thought which was certainly borne out by Captain John Stump's appearance. The written label might be wrong; not so that stamped by Neptune on a weather-beaten face and a figure like a capstan. Little more than five feet in height, he seemed to be quite five feet wide. If it be true that a poet is born, not made, Captain Stump was a master mariner from his cradle. Royson had never before seen such a man. Drawn out to Royson's stature he would yet have remained the broader of the two. The lady with him, evidently Mrs. Stump, was mated for him by happy chance. Short mean usually marry tall women, and your sons of Anak will select wives of fairy-like proportions. But Mrs. Stump was even shorter than her husband, and so plump withal, that a tape measure round her shoulders might have given her the prize for girth.
Captain Stump was examining the interior of each carriage suspiciously when he set eyes on the P. & O. officers.