“He was an educated man,” I remarked.
“Yes, I believe he was. He’s left one or two books about the forecastle which are not the sort that sailors read.”
“What class of books?” I inquired.
“Oh, one was a Latin dictionary, another an odd volume of Chambers’ Encyclopædia, and a third book called Old English Chronicles, whatever they are.”
The latter was certainly not a work in which a sailor would be interested. I had known it at college, the mediaeval chronicles of Geoffrey of Monmouth and other monks, a volume of the driest and most uninteresting kind, save to an antiquarian student. Yes, I felt more convinced than ever that Benjamin Harding was not what he had pretended to be.
The Mysterious Man had taken to smoking. I had purchased for him a shilling briar at a tobacconist’s in King’s Road, and while we talked he sat puffing at it and looking aimlessly down on the street. The pity of it all was that the poor old fellow was dumb. Even though a lunatic he might, if he could have spoken, have given us some clue to his past. But up to the present we were just as ignorant as to who or what he was as in that first moment when we had discovered him in the dark cabin of that death-ship.
To his old rusty sword he clung, as though it were a mascot. Even now he wore it suspended from his waist by a piece of cord that had come from off my trunk, and at night it reposed with him in his room. Once it had no doubt been the sharp, ready weapon of some swaggering elegant, but it was now blunt, rusted, and scabbardless, only its maker’s name and the remarkable temper of its blade showed what it once had been.
A week later I set about to discover some one who could decipher the parchments and the book containing the hidden secret of Bartholomew da Schorno, for therein I anticipated I should discover some clue to the mystery of the Seahorse. In the Manuscript Department of the British Museum I obtained the address of a certain Charles Staffurth, who, I was told, was an expert upon the court and commercial hands of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
So to his address in the Clapham Park Road, I carried my precious book and documents, and sought an interview. A prim old gentleman in steel-rimmed spectacles received me in a back room fitted as a study, and after the first half dozen words I recognized that he was a scholar.
I told the story of my discovery, to which he listened with breathless interest, and when I undid the brown paper parcel and revealed the parchments his eyes fairly danced with expectation and delight. He was an enthusiast.