And that was all. At sometime during the night he had lost (or been cunningly bereft of?) that little purse of chamois-skin containing the three golden sovereigns which he had been husbanding to pay his steamer expenses, and which, if only he had them now, would stand between him and starvation and a night in the streets.
And, searching his heart, he found it brimming with gratitude to Mulready, for having relieved him of the necessity of settling with the cabby.
"Vagabond?" said Kirkwood musingly. "Vagabond?" He repeated the word softly a number of times, to get the exact flavor of it, and found it little to his taste. And yet...
He thrust both hands deep in his trouser pockets and stared purposelessly into space, twisting his eyebrows out of alignment and crookedly protruding his lower lip.
If Brentwick were only in town--But he wasn't, and wouldn't be, within the week.
"No good waiting here," he concluded. Composing his face, he reëntered the station. There were his trunks, of course. He couldn't leave them standing on the station platform for ever.
He found the luggage-room and interviewed a mechanically courteous attendant, who, as the result of profound deliberation, advised him to try his luck at the lost-luggage room, across the station. He accepted the advice; it was a foregone conclusion that his effects had not been conveyed to the Tilbury dock; they could not have been loaded into the luggage van without his personal supervision. Still, anything was liable to happen when his unlucky star was in the ascendant.
A clerk helped him identify the articles and ultimately clucked with a perfunctory note: "Sixpence each, please."
"Sixpence each, the fixed charge, sir. For every twenty-four hours or fraction thereof, sixpence per parcel."
"Oh, thank you so much," said Kirkwood sweetly. "I will call to-morrow."
"Five times sixpence is two-and-six," Kirkwood computed, making his way hastily out of the station, lest a worse thing befall him. "No, bless your heart!--not while two and eight represents the sum total of my fortune."
He wandered out into the night; he could not linger round the station till dawn; and what profit to him if he did? Even were he to ransom his trunks, one can scarcely change one's clothing in a public waiting-room.