Now on the local London lines of railway, where there was a chance of meeting a friend or acquaintance, Cheyne always travelled first class, the difference in the fares of the first and third being only a few pence. But when he went farther into the open country, where there was practically no chance of meeting anyone who would know him, and where the difference came to many shillings, he always travelled third class. This was the most important journey of his life. He, a gentleman, was about to call upon another gentleman, and demand satisfaction, and it would not do to travel in any way that did not befit the station of men of their class.
All the way down in the train the deadliness of his design had not been lessened. He would meet this man, he would tell this man who he was, and then he would challenge him. There should be no seconds and no doctor. If the Marquis declined pistols and swords, then Cheyne would try to kill him with his hands, his fists, his thumbs dug into his throat. It was not every man, it was not one in ten thousand, could have lifted that burly ticket-collector over that gate with the neat precision he had shown. He could have thrown that man headforemost twenty feet, and broken his neck against a wall.
Cheyne engaged the best room at The Shropshire Arms, and ordered supper. It was only meet that a man come upon such a mission should be housed and fed as became a man of blood.
It would have been quite impossible for Cheyne to indulge in the luxuries of first-class travelling and first-class hotel accommodation, only he was one who always lived within his means, and had by him, when starting from London, all the money he had got for the right of re-publication in three volumes of his novel "The Duke of Fenwick." The money would not last for ever, but it would keep him going comfortably for a month or six weeks.
Cheyne was not in the least superstitious; but he did look on it as an extraordinary coincidence that the money he had got for the book which had exasperated Lord Southwold, now enabled him to come down from London, and seek satisfaction for the affront which had been put upon his mother and himself.
He asked the waiter who served the supper, if his Grace the Duke of Southwold was at home.
"No, sir, I think not. His Grace the Duke and Lord Southwold--that is, you know, sir, his lordship's only son and heir----"
"Yes, yes, I know."
"Well, sir, the two of them are gone to sea in his Grace's yacht, the Seabird, a couple, ay, or maybe three, days ago."
"And where have they sailed for?"