Dormer Colville attached so much importance to the Captain’s grave jest that he interpreted it at once to Monsieur de Gemosac.
“Captain Clubbe,” he said, “tells us that he does not need to be informed that this Loo Barebone is the man we seek. He has long known it.”
Which was a near enough rendering, perhaps, to pass muster in the hearing of two persons imperfectly acquainted with the languages so translated. Then, turning again to the sailor, he continued:
“Monsieur de Gemosac would naturally wish to know whether there were papers or any other means of identification found on the woman or the child?”
“There were a few papers. The woman had a Roman Catholic Missal in her pocket, and the child a small locket with a miniature portrait in it.”
“Of the Queen Marie Antoinette?” suggested Colville, quickly.
“It may well have been. It is many years since I saw it. It was faded enough. I remember that it had a fall, and would not open afterward. No one has seen it for twenty-five years or so.”
“The locket or the portrait?” inquired Colville, with a light laugh, with which to disclaim any suggestion of a cross-examination.
“The portrait.”
“And the locket?”
“My wife has it somewhere, I believe.”
Colville gave an impatient laugh. For the peaceful air of Farlingford had failed to temper that spirit of energy and enterprise which he had acquired in cities—in Paris, most likely. He had no tolerance for quiet ways and a slow, sure progress, such as countrymen seek, who are so leisurely that the years slide past and death surprises them before they have done anything in the world but attend to its daily demand for a passing effort.
“Ah!” he cried, “but all that must be looked into if we are to do anything for this young fellow. You will find the Marquis anxious to be up and doing at once. You go so slowly in Farlingford, Captain. The world is hurrying on and this chance will be gone past before we are ready. Let us get these small proofs of identity collected together as soon as possible. Let us find that locket. But do not force it open. Give it to me as it is. Let us find the papers.”
“There are no papers,” interrupted Captain Clubbe, with a calm deliberation quite untouched by his companion’s hurry.
“No papers?”
“No; for Frenchman burnt them before my eyes.”
Dormer Colville meditated for a moment in silence. Although his manner was quick, he was perhaps as deliberate in his choice of a question as was Captain Clubbe in answering it.
“Why did he do that? Did he know who he was? Did he ever say anything to you about his former life—his childhood—his recollections of France?”
“He was not a man to say much,” answered Clubbe, himself no man to repeat much.
Colville had been trying for some time to study the sailor’s face, quietly through his cigar smoke.
“Look here, Captain,” he said, after a pause. “Let us understand each other. There is a chance, just a chance, that we can prove this Loo Barebone to be the man we think him, but we must all stand together. We must be of one mind and one purpose. We four, Monsieur de Gemosac, you, Barebone, and my humble self. I fancy—well, I fancy it may prove to be worth our while.”
“I am willing to do the best I can for Loo,” was the reply.
“And I am willing to do the best I can for Monsieur de Gemosac, whose heart is set on this affair. And,” Colville added, with his frank laugh, “let us hope that we may have our reward; for I am a poor man myself, and do not like the prospect of a careful old age. I suppose, Captain, that if a man were overburdened with wealth he would scarcely follow a seafaring life, eh?”
“Then there is money in it?” inquired Clubbe, guardedly.
“Money,” laughed the other. “Yes—there is money for all concerned, and to spare.”
Captain Clubbe had been born and bred among a people possessing little wealth and leading a hard life, only to come to want in old age. It was natural that this consideration should carry weight. He was anxious to do his best for the boy who had been brought up as his own son. He could think of nothing better than to secure him from want for the rest of his days. There were many qualities in Loo Barebone which he did not understand, for they were quite foreign to the qualities held to be virtues in Farlingford; such as perseverance and method, a careful economy, and a rigid common sense. Frenchman had brought these strange ways into Farlingford when he was himself only a boy of ten, and they had survived his own bringing up in some of the austerest houses in the town, so vitally as to enable him to bequeath them almost unchastened to his son.
As has been noted, Loo had easily lived down the prejudices of his own generation against an un-English gaiety, and inconsequence almost amounting to emotion. And nothing is, or was in the solid days before these trumpet-blowing times, so unwelcome in British circles as emotion.
Frenchman had no doubt prepared the way for his son; but the peculiarities of thought and manner which might be allowed to pass in a foreigner would be less easily forgiven in Loo, who had Farlingford blood in his veins. For his mother had been a Clubbe, own cousin, and, as gossips whispered, once the sweetheart of Captain Clubbe himself and daughter of Seth Clubbe of Maiden’s Grave, one of the largest farmers on the Marsh.
“It cannot be for no particular purpose that the boy has been created so different from any about him,” Captain Clubbe muttered, reflectively, as he thought of Dormer Colville’s words. For he had that simple faith in an Almighty Purpose, without which no wise man will be found to do business on blue water.
“It is strange how a man may be allowed to inherit from a grandfather he has never seen a trick of manner, or a face which are not the manner or face of his father,” observed Colville, adapting himself, as was his habit, to the humour of his companion. “There must, as you suggest, be some purpose in it. God writes straight on crooked lines, Captain.”
Thus Dormer Colville found two points of sympathy with this skipper of a slow coaster, who had never made a mistake at sea nor done an injustice to any one serving under him; a simple faith in the Almighty Purpose and a very honest respect for money. This was the beginning of a sort of alliance between four persons of very different character which was to influence the whole lives of many.
They sat on the tarred seat set against the weather-beaten wall of “The Black Sailor” until darkness came stealing in from the sea with the quiet that broods over flat lands, and an unpeopled shore. Colville had many questions to ask and many more which he withheld till a fitter occasion. But he learnt that Frenchman had himself stated his name to be Barebone when he landed, a forlorn and frightened little boy, on this barren shore, and had never departed from that asseveration when he came to learn the English language and marry an English wife. Captain Clubbe told also how Frenchman, for so he continued to be called long after his real name had been written twice in the parish register, had soon after his marriage destroyed the papers carefully preserved by the woman whom he never called mother, though she herself claimed that title.
She had supported herself, it appeared, by her needle, and never seemed to want money, which led the villagers to conclude that she had some secret store upon which to draw when in need. She had received letters from France, which were carefully treasured by her until her death, and for long afterward by Frenchman, who finally burnt all at his marriage, saying that he was now an Englishman and wanted to retain no ties with France. At this time, Clubbe remembered, Louis XVIII was firmly established on the throne of France, the Restoration—known as the Second—having been brought about by the Allied Powers with a high hand after the Hundred Days and the final downfall of Napoleon.
Frenchman may well have known that it might be worth his while to return to France and seek fortune there; but he never spoke of this knowledge nor made reference to the recollections of his childhood, which cast a cold reserve over his soul and steeped it with such a deadly hatred of France and all things French, that he desired to sever all memories that might link him with his native country or awake in the hearts of any children he should beget the desire to return thither.
A year after his marriage his wife died, and thus her son, left to the care of a lonely and misanthropic father, was brought up a Frenchman after all, and lisped his first words in that tongue.
“He lived long enough to teach him to speak French and think like a Frenchman, and then he died,” said Captain Clubbe—“a young man reckoning by years, but in mind he was an older man than I am today.”
“And his secret died with him?” suggested Dormer Colville, looking at the end of his cigar with a queer smile. But Captain Clubbe made no answer.
“One may suppose that he wanted it to die with him, at all events,” added Colville, tentatively.
“You are right,” was the reply, a local colloquialism in common use, as a clincher to a closed argument or an unwelcome truth. Captain Clubbe rose as he spoke and intimated his intention of departing, by jerking his head sideways at Monsieur de Gemosac, who, however, held out his hand with a Frenchman’s conscientious desire to follow the English custom.
“I’ll be getting home,” said Clubbe, simply. As he spoke he peered across the marsh toward the river, and Colville, following the direction of his gaze, saw the black silhouette of a large lug-sail against the eastern sky, which was softly grey with the foreglow of the rising moon.
“What is that?” asked Colville.
“That’s Loo Barebone going up with the sea-breeze. He has been down to the rectory. He mostly goes there in the evening. There is a creek, you know, runs down from Maiden’s Grave to the river.”
“Ah!” answered Colville, thoughtfully, almost as if the creek and the large lug-sail against the sky explained something which he had not hitherto understood.
“I thought he might have come with you this evening,” he added, after a pause. “For I suppose everybody in Farlingford knows why we are here. He does not seem very anxious to seek his fortune in France.”
“No,” answered Clubbe, lifting his stony face to the sky and studying the little clouds that hovered overhead awaiting the moon. “No—you are right.”
Then he turned with a jerk of the head and left them. The Marquis de Gemosac watched him depart, and made a gesture toward the darkness of the night, into which he had vanished, indicative of a great despair.
“But,” he exclaimed, “they are of a placidity—these English. There is nothing to be done with them, my friend, nothing to be done with such men as that. Now I understand how it is that they form a great nation. It is merely because they stand and let you thump them until you are tired, and then they proceed to do what they intended to do from the first.”
“That is because we know that he who jumps about most actively will be the first to feel fatigue, Marquis,” laughed Colville, pleasantly. “But you must not judge all England from these eastern people. It is here that you will find the concentrated essence of British tenacity and stolidity—the leaven that leavens the whole.”
“Then it is our misfortune to have to deal with these concentrated English—that is all.”
The Marquis shrugged his shoulders with that light despair which is incomprehensible to any but men of Latin race.
“No, Marquis! there you are wrong,” corrected Dormer Colville, with a sudden gravity, “for we have in Captain Clubbe the very man we want—one of the hardest to find in this chattering world—a man who will not say too much. If we can only make him say what we want him to say he will not ruin all by saying more. It is so much easier to say a word too much than a word too little. And remember he speaks French as well as English, though, being British, he pretends that he cannot.”
Monsieur de Gemosac turned to peer at his companion in the darkness.
“You speak hopefully, my friend,” he said. “There is something in your voice—”
“Is there?” laughed Colville, who seemed elated. “There may well be. For that man has been saying things in that placid monotone which would have taken your breath away had you been able to understand them. A hundred times I rejoiced that you understood no English, for your impatience, Marquis, might have silenced him as some rare-voiced bird is silenced by a sudden movement. Yes, Marquis, there is a locket containing a portrait of Marie Antoinette. There are other things also. But there is one draw-back. The man himself is not anxious to come forward. There are reasons, it appears, here in Farlingford, why he should not seek his fortune elsewhere. To-morrow morning—”
Dormer Colville rose and yawned audibly. It almost appeared that he regretted having permitted himself a moment’s enthusiasm on a subject which scarcely affected his interests.
“To-morrow morning I will see to it.”
The Reverend Septimus Marvin had lost his wife five years earlier. It was commonly said that he had never been the same man since. Which was untrue. Much that is commonly said will, on investigation, be found to be far from the truth. Septimus Marvin had, so to speak, been the same man since infancy. He had always looked vaguely at the world through spectacles; had always been at a loss among his contemporaries—a generation already tainted by that shallow spirit of haste which is known to-day as modernity—at a loss for a word; at a loss for a companion soul.
He was a scholar and a learned historian. His companions were books, and he communed in spirit with writers who were dead and gone.
Had he ever been a different man his circumstances would assuredly have been other. His wife, for instance, would in all human probability have been alive. His avocation might have been more suited to his capabilities. He was not intended for a country parish, and that practical, human comprehension of the ultimate value of little daily details, without which a pastor never yet understood his flock, was not vouchsafed to him.
“Passen takes no account o’ churchyard,” River Andrew had said, and neither he nor any other in Farlingford could account for the special neglect to which was abandoned that particular corner of the burial ground where the late Mrs. Marvin reposed beneath an early Victorian headstone of singular hideousness.
Mr. Marvin always went round the other way.
“Seems as he has forgotten her wonderful quick,” commented the women of Farlingford. But perhaps they were wrong. If he had forgotten, he might be expected to go round by the south side of the church by accident occasionally, especially as it was the shorter way from the rectory to the porch. He was an absent-minded man, but he always remembered, as River Andrew himself admitted, to go north about. And his wife’s grave was overgrown by salted grass as were the rest.
Farlingford had accepted him, when his College, having no use for such a dreamer elsewhere, gave him the living, not only with resignation, but with equanimity. This remote parish, cut off from the busier mainland by wide heaths and marshes, sparsely provided with ill-kept roads, had never looked for a bustling activity in its rectors. Their forefathers had been content with a gentleman, given to sport and the pursuits of a country squire, marked on the seventh day by a hearty and robust godliness. They would have preferred Parson Marvin to have handled a boat and carried a gun. But he had his good qualities. He left them alone. And they are the most independent people in the world.
When his wife died, his sister, the widow of an Indian officer, bustled eastward, from a fashionable Welsh watering-place, just to satisfy herself, as she explained to her West-country friends, that he would not marry his cook before six months elapsed. After that period she proposed to wash her hands of him. She was accompanied by her only child, Miriam, who had just left school.
Six months later Septimus Marvin was called upon to give away his sister to a youthful brother officer of her late husband, which ceremony he performed with a sigh of relief audible in the farthest recess of the organ loft. While the wedding-bells were still ringing, the bride, who was not dreamy or vague like her brother, gave Septimus to understand that he had promised to provide Miriam with a home—that he really needed a woman to keep things going at the rectory and to watch over the tender years of little Sep—and that Miriam’s boxes were packed.
Septimus had no recollection of the promise. And his sister was quite hurt that he should say such a thing as that on her wedding day and spoil everything. He had no business to make the suggestion if he had not intended to carry it out. So the bride and bridegroom went away in a shower of good wishes and rice to the life of organized idleness, for which the gentleman’s education and talents eminently befitted him, and Miriam returned to Farlingford with Septimus.
In those days the railway passed no nearer to Farlingford than Ipswich, and before the arrival of their train at that station Miriam had thoroughly elucidated the situation. She had discovered that she was not expected at the rectory, and that Septimus had never offered of his own free will the home which he now kindly pressed upon her—two truths which the learned historian fondly imagined to be for ever locked up in his own heart, which was a kind one and the heart of a gentleman.
Miriam also learned that Septimus was very poor. She did not need to be informed that he was helpless. Her instinct had told her that long ago. She was only nineteen, but she looked at men and women with those discerning grey eyes, in which there seemed to lurk a quiet light like the light of stars, and saw right through them. She was woman enough—despite the apparent inconsequence of the schoolroom, which still lent a vagueness to her thoughts and movements—to fall an easy victim to the appeal of helplessness. Years, it would appear, are of no account in certain feminine instincts. Miriam had probably been woman enough at ten years of age to fly to the rescue of the helpless.
She did not live permanently at the rectory, but visited her mother from time to time, either in England, or at one of the foreign resorts of idle people. But the visits, as years went by, became shorter and rarer. At twenty-one Miriam came into a small fortune of her own, left by her father in the hands of executors, one of whom was that John Turner, the Paris banker, who had given Dormer Colville a letter of introduction to Septimus Marvin. The money was sorely needed at the rectory, and Miriam drew freely enough on John Turner.
“You are an extravagant girl,” said that astute financier to her, when they met at the house of Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence, at Royan, in France. “I wonder what you spend it on! But I don’t trouble my head about it. You need not explain, you understand. But you can come to me when you want advice or help. You will find me—in the background. I am a fat old man, in the background. Useful enough in my way, perhaps, even to a pretty girl with a sound judgment.”
There were many, who, like Loo Barebone, reflected that there were other worlds open to Miriam Liston. At first she went into those other worlds, under the flighty wing of her mother, and looked about her there. Captain and Mrs. Duncan belonged to the Anglo-French society, which had sprung into existence since the downfall of Napoleon I, and was in some degree the outcome of the part played by Great Britain in the comedy of the Bourbon and Orleanist collapse. Captain Duncan had retired from the army, changing his career from one of a chartered to an unchartered uselessness, and he herded with tarnished aristocracy and half-pay failures in the smoking-rooms of Continental clubs.
Miriam returned, after a short experience of this world, to Farlingford, as to the better part. At first she accepted invitations to some of the country houses open to her by her connection with certain great families. But after a time she seemed to fall under the spell of that quiet life which is still understood and lived in a few remote places.
“What can you find to do all day and to think about all night at that bleak corner of England?” inquired her friends, themselves restless by day and sleepless by night by reason of the heat of their pursuit of that which is called pleasure.
“If he wants to marry his cook let him do it and be done with us,” wrote her mother from the south of France. “Come and join us at Biarritz. The Prince President will be here this winter. We shall be very gay.... P.S. We shall not ask you to stay with us as we are hard up this quarter; but to share expenses. Mind come.”
But Miriam remained at Farlingford, and there is nothing to be gained by seeking to define her motive. There are two arguments against seeking a woman’s motive. Firstly, she probably has none. Secondly, should she have one she will certainly have a counterfeit, which she will dangle before your eyes, and you will seize it.
Dormer Colville might almost be considered to belong to the world of which Captain and Mrs. Duncan were such brilliant ornaments. But he did not so consider himself. For their world was essentially British, savoured here and there by a French count or so, at whose person and title the French aristocracy of undoubted genuineness looked askance. Dormer Colville counted his friends among these latter. In fact, he moved in those royalist circles who thought that there was little to choose between the Napoleonic and the Orleanistrégime. He carefully avoided intimacy with Englishmen whose residence in foreign parts was continuous and in constant need of explanation. Indeed, if a man’s life needs explanation, he must sooner or later find himself face to face with some one who will not listen to him.
Colville, however, knew all about Captain Duncan, and knew what was ignored by many, namely, that he was nothing worse than foolish. He knew all about Miriam, for he was in the confidence of Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence. He knew that that lady wondered why Miriam preferred Farlingford to the high-bred society of her own circle at Royan and in Paris.
He thought he knew why Loo Barebone showed so little enterprise. And he was, as Madame de Chantonnay had frequently told him, more than half a Frenchman in the quickness of his intuitions. He picked a flower for his buttonhole from the garden of the “Black Sailor,” and set forth the morning after his interview with Captain Clubbe toward the rectory. It was a cool July morning, with the sun half obscured by a fog-bank driven in from the sea. Through the dazzling white of that which is known on these coasts as the water-smoke the sky shone a cloudless blue. The air was light and thin. It is the lightest and thinnest air in England. Dormer Colville hummed a song under his breath as he walked on the top of the dyke. He was a light-hearted man, full of hope and optimism.
“Am I disturbing your studies?” he asked, with his easy laugh, as he came rather suddenly on Miriam and little Sep in the turf-shelter at the corner of the rectory garden. “You must say so if I am.”
They had, indeed, their books, and the boy’s face wore that abstracted look which comes from a very earnest desire not to see the many interesting things on earth and sea, which always force themselves upon the attention of the young at the wrong time. Colville had already secured Sep’s friendship by the display of a frank ignorance of natural history only equalled by his desire to be taught.
“We’re doing history,” replied Sep, frankly, jumping up and shaking hands.
“Ah, yes. William the Conqueror, ten hundred and sixty-six, and all the rest of it. I know. At least I knew once, but I have forgotten.”
“No. We’re doing French history. Miriam likes that best, but I hate it.”
“French history,” said Colville, thoughtfully. “Yes. That is interesting. Miss Liston likes that best, does she? Or, perhaps, she thinks that it is best for you to know it. Do you know all about Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette?”
“Pretty well,” admitted Sep, doubtfully.
“When I was a little chap like you, I knew many people who had seen Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. That was long, long ago,” he added, turning to Miriam to make the admission. “But those are not the things that one forgets, are they, Miss Liston?”
“Then I wish Sep could know somebody who would make him remember,” answered Miriam, half closing the book in her hand; for she was very quick and had seen Colville’s affable glance take it in in passing, as it took in everything within sight.
“A King, for instance,” he said, slowly. “A King of France. Others—prophets and righteous men—have desired to see that, Miss Liston.”
It seemed, however, that he had seen enough to know the period which they were studying.
“I suppose,” he said, after a pause, “that in this studious house you talk and think history, and more especially French history. It must be very quiet and peaceful. Much more restful than acting in it as my friend de Gemosac has done all his life, as I myself have done in a small way. For France takes her history so much more violently than you do in England. France is tossed about by it, while England stands and is hammered on the anvil of Time, as it were, and remains just the same shape as before.”
He broke off and turned to Sep.
“Do you know the story of the little boy who was a King?” he asked, abruptly. “They put him in prison and he escaped. He was carried out in a clothes-basket. Funny, is it not? And he escaped from his enemies and reached another country, where he became a sailor. He grew to be a man and he married a woman of that country, and she died, leaving him with a little boy. And then he died himself and left the little boy, who was taken care of by his English relations, who never knew that he was a King. But he was; for his father was a King before him, and his grandfathers—far, far back. Back to the beginning of the book that Miss Liston holds in her hand. The little boy—he was an orphan, you see—became a sailor. He never knew that he was a King—the Hope of his country, of all the old men and the wise men in it—the holder of the fate of nations. Think of that.”
The story pleased Sep, who sat with open lips and eager eyes, listening to it.
“Do you think it is an interesting story? What do you think is the end of it?”
“I don’t know,” answered Sep, gravely.
“Neither do I. No one knows the end of that story—yet. But if you were a King—if you were that boy—what would you do? Would you go and be a King, or would you be afraid?”
“No. I should go and be a King. And fight battles.”
“But you would have to leave everybody. You would have to leave your father.”
“I should not mind that,” answered Sep, brutally.
“You would leave Miss Liston?”
“I should have to,” was the reply, with conviction.
“Ah, yes,” said Colville, with a grave nod of the head. “Yes. I suppose you would have to if you were anything of a man at all. There would be no alternative—for a real man.”
“Besides,” put in Sep, jumping from side to side on his seat with eagerness, “she would make me—wouldn’t you, Miriam?”
Colville had turned away and was looking northward toward the creek, known as Maiden’s Grave, running through the marshes to the river. A large lug-sail broke the flat line of the horizon, though the boat to which it belonged was hidden by the raised dyke.
“Would she?” inquired Colville, absent-mindedly, without taking his eyes from the sail which was creeping slowly toward them. “Well—you know Miss Liston’s character better than I do, Sep. And no doubt you are right. And you are not that little boy, so it doesn’t matter; does it?”
After a pause he turned and glanced sideways at Miriam, who was looking straight in front of her with steady eyes and white cheeks.
They could hear Loo Barebone singing gaily in the boat, which was hidden below the level of the dyke. And they watched, in a sudden silence, the sail pass down the river toward the quay.
The tide was ebbing still when Barebone loosed his boat, one night, from the grimy steps leading from the garden of Maiden’s Grave farm down to the creek. It was at the farm-house that Captain Clubbe now lived when on shore. He had lived there since the death of his brother, two years earlier—that grim Clubbe of Maiden’s Grave, whose methods of life and agriculture are still quoted on market days from Colchester to Beccles.
The evenings were shorter now, for July was drawing to a close, and the summer is brief on these coasts. The moon was not up yet, but would soon rise. Barebone hoisted the great lug-sail, that smelt of seaweed and tannin. There was a sleepy breeze blowing in from the cooler sea, to take the place of that hot and shimmering air which had been rising all day from the corn-fields. He was quicker in his movements than those who usually handled these stiff ropes and held the clumsy tiller. Quick—and quiet for once. He had been three nights to the rectory, only to find the rector there, vaguely kind, looking at him with a watery eye, through the spectacles which were rarely straight upon his nose, with an unasked question on his hesitating lips.
For Septimus Marvin knew that Colville, in the name of the Marquis de Gemosac, had asked Loo Barebone to go to France and institute proceedings there to recover a great heritage, which it seemed must be his. And Barebone had laughed and put off his reply from day to day for three days.
Few knew of it in Farlingford, though many must have suspected the true explanation of the prolonged stay of the two strangers at the “Black Sailor.” Captain Clubbe and Septimus Marvin, Dormer Colville and Monsieur de Gemosac shared this knowledge, and awaited, impatiently enough, an answer which could assuredly be only in the affirmative. Clubbe was busy enough throughout the day at the old slip-way, where “The Last Hope” was under repair—the last ship, it appeared likely, that the rotten timbers could support or the old, old shipwrights mend.
Loo Barebone was no less regular in his attendance at the river-side, and worked all day, on deck or in the rigging, at leisurely sail-making or neat seizing of a worn rope. He was gay, and therefore incomprehensible to a slow-thinking, grave-faced race.
“What do I want with a heritage?” he asked, carelessly. “I am mate of ‘The Last Hope’—and that is all. Give me time. I have not made up my mind yet, but I think it will be No.”
And oddly enough, it was Colville who preached patience to his companions in suspense.
“Give him time,” he said. “There can only be one answer to such a proposal. But he is young. It is not when we are young that we see the world as it really is, but live in a land of dreams. Give him time.”
The Marquis de Gemosac was impatient, however, and was for telling Barebone more than had been disclosed to him.
“There is no knowing,” he cried, “what thatcanailleis doing in France.”
“There is no knowing,” admitted Colville, with his air of suppressing a half-developed yawn, “but I think we know, all the same—you and I, Marquis. And there is no hurry.”
After three days Loo Barebone had still given no answer. As he hoisted the sail and felt for the tiller in the dark, he was, perhaps, meditating on this momentous reply, or perhaps he had made up his mind long before, and would hold to the decision even to his own undoing, as men do who are impulsive and not strong. The water lapped and gurgled round the bows, for the wind was almost ahead, and it was only by nursing the heavy boat that he saved the necessity of making a tack across the narrow creek. In the morning he had, as usual, run down into the river and to the slip-way, little suspecting that Miriam and Sep were just above him behind the dyke, where they had sat three days before listening to Dormer Colville’s story of the little boy who was a King. To-night he ran the boat into the coarse and wiry grass where Septimus Marvin’s own dinghy lay, half hidden by the reeds, and he stumbled ashore clutching at the dewy grass as he climbed the side of the dyke.
He went toward the turf-shelter half despondently, and then stopped short a few yards away from it. For Miriam was there. He thought she was alone, and paused to make sure before he spoke. She was sitting at the far corner, sheltered from the north wind. For Farlingford is like a ship—always conscious of the lee- and the weather-side, and all who live there are half sailors in their habits—subservient to the wind.
“At last,” said Loo, with a little vexed laugh. He could see her face turned toward him, but her eyes were only dark shadows beneath her hair. Her face looked white in the darkness. Her answering laugh had a soothing note in it.
“Why—at last?” she asked. Her voice was frank and quietly assured in its friendliness. They were old comrades, it seemed, and had never been anything else. The best friendship is that which has never known a quarrel, although poets and others may sing the tenderness of a reconciliation. The friendship that has a quarrel and a reconciliation in it is like a man with a weak place left in his constitution by a past sickness. He may die of something else in the end, but the probability is that he must reckon at last with that healed sore. The friendship may perish from some other cause—a marriage, or success in life, one of the two great severers—but that salved quarrel is more than likely to recur and kill at last.
These two had never fallen out. And it was the woman who, contrary to custom, fended the quarrel now.
“Oh! because I have been here three nights in succession, I suppose, and did not find you here. I was disappointed.”
“But you found Uncle Septimus in his study. I could hear you talking there until quite late.”
“Of course I was very glad to see him and talk with him. For it is to him that I owe a certain half-developed impatience with the uneducated—with whom I deal all my life, except for a few hours now and then in the study and here in the turf-shelter with you. I can see—even in the dark—that you look grave. Do not do that. It is not worth that.”
He broke off with his easy laugh, as if to banish any suggestion of gravity coming from himself.
“It is not worth looking grave about. And I am sorry if I was rude a minute ago. I had no right, of course, to assume that you would be here. I suppose it was impertinent—was that it?”
“I will not quarrel,” she answered, soothingly—“if that is what you want.”
Her voice was oddly placid. It almost seemed to suggest that she had come to-night for a certain purpose; that one subject of conversation alone would interest her, and that to all others she must turn a deaf ear.
He came a little nearer, and, leaning against the turf wall, looked down at her. He was suddenly grave now. Theróleswere again reversed; for it was the woman who was tenacious to one purpose and the man who seemed inconsequent, flitting from grave to gay, from one thought to another. His apology had been made graciously enough, but with a queer pride, quite devoid of the sullenness which marks the pride of the humbly situated.
“No; I do not want that,” he answered. “I want a little sympathy, that is all; because I have been educated above my station. And I looked for it from those who are responsible for that which is nearly always a catastrophe. And it is your uncle who educated me. He is responsible in the first instance, and, of course, I am grateful to him.”
“He could never have educated you,” put in Miriam, “if you had not been ready for the education.”
Barebone put aside the point. He must, at all events, have learnt humility from Septimus Marvin—a quality not natural to his temperament.
“And you are responsible, as well,” he went on, “because you have taught me a use for the education.”
“Indeed!” she said, gently and interrogatively, as if at last he had reached the point to which she wished to bring him.
“Yes; the best use to which I could ever put it. To talk to you on an equality.”
He looked hard at her through the darkness, which was less intense now; for the moon was not far below the horizon. Her face looked white, and he thought that she was breathing quickly. But they had always been friends; he remembered that just in time.
“It is only natural that I should look forward, when we are at sea, to coming back here—” He paused and kicked the turf-wall with his heel, as if to remind her that she had sat in the same corner before and he had leant against the same wall, talking to her. “They are good fellows, of course, with a hundred fine qualities which I lack, but they do not understand half that one may say, or think—even the Captain. He is well educated, in his way, but it is only the way of a coasting-captain who has risen by his merits to the command of a foreign-going ship.”
Miriam gave an impatient little sigh. He had veered again from the point.
“You think that I forget that he is my relative,” said Loo, sharply, detecting in his quickness of thought a passing resentment. “I do not. I never forget that. I am the son of his cousin. I know that, and thus related to many in Farlingford. But I have never called him cousin, and he has never asked me to.”
“No,” said Miriam, with averted eyes, in that other voice, which made him turn and look at her, catching his breath.
“Oh!” he said, with a sudden laugh of comprehension. “You have heard what, I suppose, is common talk in Farlingford. You know what has brought these people here—this Monsieur de Gemosac, and the other—what is his name? Dormer Colville. You have heard of my magnificent possibilities. And I—I had forgotten all about them.”
He threw out his arms in a gesture of gay contempt; for even in the dark he could not refrain from adding to the meaning of mere words a hundred-fold by the help of his lean hands and mobile face.
“I have heard of it, of course,” she admitted, “from several people. But I have heard most from Captain Clubbe. He takes it more seriously than you do. You do not know, because he is one of those men who are most silent with those to whom they are most attached. He thinks that it is providential that my uncle should have had the desire to educate you, and that you should have displayed such capacity to learn.”
“Capacity?” he protested—“say genius! Do not let us do things by halves. Genius to learn—yes; go on.”
“Ah! you may laugh,” Miriam said, lightly, “but it is serious enough. You will find circumstances too strong for you. You will have to go to France to claim your—heritage.”
“Not I, if it means leaving Farlingford for ever and going to live among strange people, like the Marquis de Gemosac, for instance, who gives me the impression of a thousand petty ceremonies and a million futile memories.”
He turned and lifted his face to the breeze which blew from the sea over flat stretches of sand and seaweed—the crispest, most invigorating air in the world except that which blows on the Baltic shores.
“I prefer Farlingford. I am half a Clubbe—and the other half!—Heaven knows what that is! The offshoot of some forgotten seedling blown away from France by a great storm. If my father knew, he never said anything. And if he knew, and said nothing, one may be sure that it was because he was ashamed of what he knew. You never saw him, or you would have known his dread of France, or anything that was French. He was a man living in a dream. His body was here in Farlingford, but his mind was elsewhere—who knows where? And at times I feel that, too—that unreality—as if I were here, and somewhere else at the same time. But all the same, I prefer Farlingford, even if it is a dream.”
The moon had risen at last; a waning half-moon, lying low and yellow in the sky, just above the horizon, casting a feeble light on earth. Loo turned and looked at Miriam, who had always met his glance with her thoughtful, steady eyes. But now she turned away.
“Farlingford is best, at all events,” he said, with an odd conviction. “I am only the grandson of old Seth Clubbe, of Maiden’s Grave. I am a Farlingford sailor, and that is all. I am mate of ‘The Last Hope’—at your service.”
“You are more than that.”
He made a step nearer to her, looking down at her white face, averted from him. For her voice had been uncertain—unsteady—as if she were speaking against her will.
“Even if I am only that,” he said, suddenly grave, “Farlingford may still be a dream—Farlingford and—you.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, in a quick, mechanical voice, as if she had reached a desired crisis at last and was prepared to act.
“Oh, I only mean what I have meant always,” he answered. “But I have been afraid—afraid. One hears, sometimes, of a woman who is generous enough to love a man who is a nobody—to think only of love. Sometimes—last voyage, when you used to sit where you are sitting now—I have thought that it might have been my extraordinary good fortune to meet such a woman.”
He waited for some word or sign, but she sat motionless.
“You understand,” he went on, “how contemptible must seem their talk of a heritage in France, when such a thought is in one’s mind, even if—”
“Yes,” she interrupted, hastily. “You were quite wrong. You were mistaken.”
“Mistaking in thinking you—”
“Yes,” she interrupted again. “You are quite mistaken, and I am very sorry, of course, that it should have happened.”
She was singularly collected, and spoke in a matter-of-fact voice. Barebone’s eyes gleamed suddenly; for she had aroused-perhaps purposely—a pride which must have accumulated in his blood through countless generations. She struck with no uncertain hand.
“Yes,” he said, slowly; “it is to be regretted. Is it because I am the son of a nameless father and only the mate of ‘The Last Hope’?”
“If you were before the mast—” she answered—“if you were a King, it would make no difference. It is simply because I do not care for you in that way.”
“You do not care for me—in that way,” he echoed, with a laugh, which made her move as if she were shrinking. “Well, there is nothing more to be said to that.”
He looked at her slowly, and then took off his cap as if to bid her good-bye. But he forgot to replace it, and he went away with the cap in his hand. She heard the clink of a chain as he loosed his boat.