CHAPTER IV. THE MARQUIS'S CREED
Dormer Colville smiled doubtfully. He was too polite, it seemed, to be sceptical, and by his attitude expressed a readiness to be convinced as much from indifference as by reasoning.
“It is intolerable,” said the Marquis de Gemosac, “that a man of your understanding should be misled by a few romantic writers in the pay of the Orleans.”
“I am not misled, Marquis; I am ignorant,” laughed Colville. “It is not always the same thing.”
Monsieur de Gemosac threw away his cigarette and turned eagerly toward his companion.
“Listen,” he said. “I can convince you in a few words.”
And Colville leaned back against the weather-worn seat with the air of one prepared to give a post-prandial attention.
“Such a man was found as you yourself suggest. A boy was found who could not refuse to run that great risk, who could not betray himself by indiscreet speech—because he was dumb. In order to allay certain rumours which were going the round of Europe, the National Convention sent three of its members to visit the Dauphin in prison, and they themselves have left a record that he answered none of their questions and spoke no word to them. Why? Because he was dumb. He merely sat and looked at them solemnly, as the dumb look. It was not the Dauphin at all. He was hidden in the loft above. The visit of the Conventionals was not satisfactory. The rumours were not stilled by it. There is nothing so elusive or so vital as a rumour. Ah! you smile, my friend.”
“I always give a careful attention to rumours,” admitted Colville. “More careful than that which one accords to official announcements.”
“Well, the dumb boy was not satisfactory. Those who were paid for this affair began to be alarmed. Not for their pockets. There was plenty of money. Half the crowned heads in Europe, and all the women, were ready to open their purses for the sake of a little boy, whose ill-treatment appealed to their soft hearts: who in a sense was sacred, for he was descended from sixty-six kings. No! Barras and all the other scoundrels began to perceive that there was only one way out of the difficulty into which they had blundered. The Dauphin must die! So the dumb boy disappeared. One wonders whither he went and what his fate might be—”
“With so much to tell,” put in Dormer Colville, musingly; “so much unspoken.”
It was odd how the roles had been reversed. For the Marquis de Gemosac was now eagerly seeking to convince his companion. The surest way to persuade a man is to lead him to persuade himself.
“The only solution was for the Dauphin to die—in public. So another substitution was effected,” continued Monsieur de Gemosac. “A dying boy from the hospital was made to play the part of the Dauphin. He was not at all like him; for he was tall and dark—taller and darker than a son of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette could ever have been. The prison was reconstructed so that the sentry on guard could not see his prisoner, but was forced to call to him in order to make sure that he was there. It was a pity that he did not resemble the Dauphin at all, this scrofulous child. But they were in a hurry, and they were at their wits' ends. And it is not always easy to find a boy who will die in a given time. This boy had to die, however, by some means or other. It was for France, you understand, and the safety of the Great Republic.”
“One hopes that he appreciated his privilege,” observed Colville, philosophically.
“And he must die in public, duly certified for by persons of undoubted integrity. They called in, at the last moment, Desault, a great doctor of that day. But Desault was, unfortunately, honest. He went home and told his assistant that this was not the Dauphin, and that, whoever he might be, he was being poisoned. The assistant's name was Choppart, and this Choppart made up a medicine, on Desault's prescription, which was an antidote to poison.”
Monsieur de Gemosac paused, and, turning to his companion, held up one finger to command his full attention.
“Desault died, my friend, four days later, and Choppart died five days after him, and the boy in the Temple died three days after Choppart. And no one knows what they died of. They were pretty bunglers, those gentlemen of the Republic! Of course, they called in others in a hurry; men better suited to their purpose. And one of these, the citizen Pelletan, has placed on record some preposterous lies. These doctors certified that this was the Dauphin. They had never seen him before, but what matter? Great care was taken to identify the body. Persons of position, who had never seen the son of Louis XVI., were invited to visit the Temple. Several of them had the temerity to protect themselves in the certificate. 'We saw what we were informed was the body of the Dauphin,' they said.”
Again the old man turned, and held up his hand in a gesture of warning.
“If they wanted a witness whose testimony was without question—whose word would have laid the whole question in that lost and forgotten grave for ever—they had one in the room above. For the Dauphin's sister was there, Marie Therese Charlotte, she who is now Duchess of Angouleme. Why did they not bring her down to see the body, to testify that her brother was dead and the line of Louis XVI. ended? Was it chivalry? I ask you if these had shown chivalry to Madame de Lamballe? to Madame Elizabeth? to Marie Antoinette? Was it kindness toward a child of unparalleled misfortune? I ask you if they had been kind to those whom they called the children of the tyrant? No! They did not conduct her to that bedside, because he who lay there was not her brother. Are we children, Monsieur, to be deceived by a tale of a sudden softness of heart? They wished to spare this child the pain! Had they ever spared any one pain—the National Assembly?”
And the Marquis de Gemosac's laugh rang with a hatred which must, it seems, outlive the possibility of revenge.
“There was to be a public funeral. Such a ceremony would have been of incalculable value at that time. But, at the last minute, their courage failed them. The boy was thrown into a forgotten corner of a Paris churchyard, at nine o'clock one night, without witnesses. The spot itself cannot now be identified. Do you tell me that that was the Dauphin? Bah! my friend, the thing was too childish!”
“The ignorant and the unlettered,” observed Colville, with the air of making a concession, “are always at a disadvantage—even in crime.”
“That the Dauphin was, in the mean time, concealed in the garret of the Tower appears to be certain. That he was finally conveyed out of the prison in a clothes-basket is as certain, Monsieur, as it is certain that the sun will rise to-morrow. And I believe that the Queen knew, when she went to the guillotine, that her son was no longer in the Temple. I believe that Heaven sent her that one scrap of comfort, tempered as it was by the knowledge that her daughter remained a prisoner in their hands. But it was to her son that her affections were given. For the Duchess never had the gift of winning love. As she is now—a cold, hard, composed woman—so she was in her prison in the Temple at the age of fifteen. You may take it from one who has known her all his life. And from that moment to this—”
The Marquis paused, and made a gesture with his hands, descriptive of space and the unknown.
“From that moment to this—nothing. Nothing of the Dauphin.”
He turned in his seat and looked questioningly up toward the crumbling church, with its square tower, stricken, years ago, by lightning; with its grass-grown graveyard marked by stones all grey and hoary with immense age and the passage of cold and stormy winters.
“Who knows,” he added, “what may have become of him? Who can say where he lies? For a life begun as his began was not likely to be a long one. Though troubles do not kill. Witness myself, who am five years his senior.”
Colville looked at him in obedience to an inviting gesture of the hand; looked as at something he did not understand, something beyond his understanding, perhaps. For the troubles had not been Monsieur de Gemosac's own troubles, but those of his country.
“And the Duchess?” said the Englishman at length, after a pause, “at Frohsdorf—what does she say—or think?”
“She says nothing,” replied the Marquis de Gemosac, sharply. “She is silent, because the world is listening for every word she may utter. What she thinks.... Ah! who knows? She is an old woman, my friend, for she is seventy-one. Her memories are a millstone about her neck. No wonder she is silent. Think what her life has been. As a child, three years of semi-captivity at the Tuileries, with the mob howling round the railings. Three and a half years a prisoner in the Temple. Both parents sent to the guillotine—her aunt to the same. All her world—massacred. As a girl, she was collected, majestic; or else she could not have survived those years in the Temple, alone—the last of her family. What must her thoughts have been, at night in her prison? As a woman, she is cold, sad, unemotional. No one ever lived through such troubles with so little display of feeling. The Restoration, the Hundred Days, the second Restoration, Louis XVIII., and his flight to England; Charles X. and his abdication; her own husband, the Duc d'Angouleme—the Dauphin for many years, the King for half an hour—these are some of her experiences. She has lived for forty years in exile in Mittau, Memel, Warsaw, Konigsberg, Prague, England; and now she is at Frohsdorf, awaiting the end. You ask me what she says? She says nothing, but she knows—she has always known—that her brother did not die in the Temple.”
“Then—” suggested Colville, who certainly had acquired the French art of putting much meaning into one word.
“Then why not seek him? you would ask. How do you know that she has not done so, my friend, with tears? But as years passed on, and brought no word of him, it became less and less desirable. While Louis XVIII. continued to reign there was no reason to wish to find Louis XVII., you understand. For there was still a Bourbon, of the direct line, upon the throne. Louis XVIII. would scarcely desire it. One would not expect him to seek very diligently for one who would deprive him of the crown. Charles X., knowing he must succeed his brother, was no more enthusiastic in the search. And the Duchess d'Angouleme herself, you ask? I can see the question in your face.”
“Yes,” conceded Colville. “For, after all, he was her brother.”
“Yes—and if she found him, what would be the result? Her uncle would be driven from the throne; her father-in-law would not inherit; her own husband, the Dauphin, would be Dauphin no longer. She herself could never be Queen of France. It is a hard thing to say of a woman—”
Monsieur de Gemosac paused for a moment in reflection.
“Yes,” he said at length, “a hard thing. But this is a hard world, Monsieur Colville, and will not allow either men or women to be angels. I have known and served the Duchess all my life, and I confess that she has never lost sight of the fact that, should Louis XVII. be found, she herself would never be Queen of France. One is not a Bourbon for nothing.”
“One is not a stateswoman and a daughter of kings for nothing,” amended Colville, with his tolerant laugh; for he was always ready to make allowances. “Better, perhaps, that France should be left quiet, under the regime she had accepted, than disturbed by the offer of another regime, which might be less acceptable. You always remind me—you, who deal with France—of a lion-tamer at a circus. You have a very slight control over your performing beasts. If they refuse to do the trick you propose, you do not press it, but pass on to another trick; and the bars of the cage always appear to the onlooker to be very inadequate. Perhaps it was better, Marquis, to let the Dauphin go; to pass him over, and proceed to the tricks suitable to the momentary humour of your wild animals.”
The Marquis de Gemosac gave a curt laugh, which thrilled with a note of that fearful joy known to those who seek to control the uncontrollable.
“At that time,” he admitted, “it might be so. But not now. At that time there lived Louis XVIII. and Charles X., and his sons, the Duc d'Angouleme and the Duc de Berri, who might reasonably be expected to have sons in their turn. There were plenty of Bourbons, it seemed. And now—where are they? What is left of them?”
He gave a nod of the head toward the sea that lay between him and Germany.
“One old woman, over there, at Frohsdorf, the daughter of Marie Antoinette, awaiting the end of her bitter pilgrimage—and this Comte de Chambord. This man who will not when he may. No, my friend, it has never been so necessary to find Louis XVII. as it is now. Necessary for France—for the whole world. This Prince President, this last offshoot of a pernicious republican growth, will drag us all in the mud if he gets his way with France. And those who have watched with seeing eyes have always known that such a time as the present must eventually come. For France will always be the victim of a clever adventurer. We have foreseen it, and for that reason we have treated as serious possibilities these false Dauphins who have sprung up like mushrooms all over Europe and even in America. And what have they proved? What have the Bourbons proved in frustrating their frauds? That the son of Louis XVI. did not die in the Temple. That is all. And Madame herself has gathered further strength to her conviction that the little King was not buried in that forgotten corner of the graveyard of Sainte Marguerite. At the same time, she knows that none of these—neither Naundorff, nor Havergault, nor Bruneau, nor de Richemont, nor any other pretender—was her brother. No! The King, either because he did not know he was King, or because he had had enough of royalty, never came forward and never betrayed his whereabouts. He was to be sought; he is still to be sought. And it is now that he is wanted.”
“That is why I offer to tell you this story now. That is my reason for bringing you to Farlingford now,” said Colville, quietly. It seemed that he must have awaited, as the wise do in this world, the propitious moment, and should it never come they are content to forego their purpose. He gave a light laugh and stretched out his long legs, contemplating his strapped trousers and neat boots with the eye of a connoisseur. “And should I be the humble means of doing a good turn to France and others, will France—and others—remember it, I wonder. Perhaps I hold in my hands the Hope of France, Marquis.”
He paused, and lapsed for a moment into thought. It was eight o'clock, and the long northern twilight was fading into darkness now. The bell of Captain Clubbe's ship rang out the hour—a new sound in the stillness of this forgotten town.
“The Last Hope,” added Dormer Colville, with a queer laugh.
CHAPTER V. ON THE DYKE
Neither had spoken again when their thoughts were turned aside from that story which Colville, instead of telling, had been called upon to hear.
For the man whose story it presumably was passed across the green ere the sound of the ship's bell had died away. He had changed his clothes, or else it would have appeared that he was returning to his ship. He walked with his head thrown up, with long lithe steps, with a gait and carriage so unlike the heavy tread of men wearing sea-boots all their working days, that none would have believed him to be born and bred in Farlingford. For it is not only in books that history is written, but in the turn of a head, in the sound of a voice, in the vague and dreamy thoughts half formulated by the human mind 'twixt sleeping and waking.
Monsieur de Gemosac paused, with his cigarette held poised halfway to his lips, and watched the man go past, while Dormer Colville, leaning back against the wall, scanned him sideways between lowered lids.
It would seem that Barebone must have an appointment. He walked without looking about him, like one who is late. He rather avoided than sought the greeting of a friend from the open cottage-doors as he passed on. On reaching the quay he turned quickly to the left, following the path that led toward the dyke at the riverside.
“He is no sailor at heart,” commented Colville. “He never even glanced at his ship.”
“And yet it was he who steered the ship in that dangerous river.”
“He may be skilful in anything he undertakes,” suggested Colville, in explanation. “It is Captain Clubbe who will tell us that. For Captain Clubbe has known him since his birth, and was the friend of his father.”
They sat in silence watching the shadowy figure on the dyke, outlined dimly against the hazy horizon. He was walking, still with haste as if to a certain destination, toward the rectory buried in its half circle of crouching trees. And already another shadow was hurrying from the house to meet him. It was the boy, little Sep Marvin, and in the stillness of the evening his shrill voice could be heard in excited greeting.
“What have you brought? What have you brought?” he was crying, as he ran toward Barebone. They seemed to have so much to say to each other that they could not wait until they came within speaking distance. The boy took Barebone's hand, and turning walked back with him to the old house peeping over the dyke toward the sea. He could scarcely walk quietly, for joy at the return of his friend, and skipped from side to side, pouring out questions and answering them himself as children and women do.
But Barebone gave him only half of his attention and looked before him with grave eyes, while the boy talked of nests and knives. Barebone was looking toward the garden, concealed like an intrenchment behind the dyke. It was a quiet evening, and the rector was walking slowly backward and forward on the raised path, made on the dyke itself, like a ship-captain on his quarter-deck, with hands clasped behind his bent back and eyes that swept the horizon at each turn with a mechanical monotony. At one end of the path, which was worn smooth by the Reverend Septimus Marvin's pensive foot, the gleam of a white dress betrayed the presence of his niece, Miriam Liston.
“Ah, is that you?” asked the rector, holding out a limp hand. “Yes. I remember Sep was allowed to sit up till half-past eight in the hope that you might come round to see us. Well, Loo, and how are you? Yes—yes.”
And he looked vaguely out to sea, repeating below his breath the words “Yes—yes” almost in a whisper, as if communing secretly with his own thoughts out of hearing of the world.
“Of course I should come round to see you,” answered Barebone. “Where else should I go? So soon as we had had tea and I could change my clothes and get away from that dear Mrs. Clubbe. It seems so strange to come back here from the racketing world—and France is a racketing world of its own—and find everything in Farlingford just the same.”
He had shaken hands with the rector and with Miriam Liston as he spoke, and his speech was not the speech of Farlingford men at all, but rather of Septimus Marvin himself, of whose voice he had acquired the ring of education, while adding to it a neatness and quickness of enunciation which must have been his own; for none in Suffolk could have taught it to him.
“Just the same,” he repeated, glancing at the book Miriam had laid aside for a moment to greet him and had now taken up again. “That book must be very large print,” he said, “for you to be able to read by this light.”
“It is large print,” answered the girl, with a friendly laugh, as she returned to it.
“And you are still resolved to be a sailor?” inquired Marvin, looking at him with kind eyes for ever asleep, it would appear, in some long slumber which must have been the death of one of the sources of human energy—of ambition or of hope.
“Until I find a better calling,” answered Loo Barebone, with his eager laugh. “When I am away I wonder how any can be content to live in Farlingford and let the world go by. And when I am here I wonder how any can be so foolish as to fret and fume in the restless world while he might be sitting quietly at Farlingford.”
“Ah,” murmured the rector, musingly, “you are for the world. You, with your capacities, your quickness for learning, your—well, your lightness of heart, my dear Loo. That goes far in the great world. To be light of heart—to amuse. Yes, you are for the world. You might do something there.”
“And nothing in Farlingford?” inquired Barebone, gaily; but he turned, as he spoke, and glanced once more at Miriam Liston as if in some dim way the question could not be answered by any other. She was absorbed in her book again. The print must indeed have been large and clear, for the twilight was fading fast.
She looked up and met his glance with direct and steady eyes of a clear grey. A severe critic of that which none can satisfactorily define—a woman's beauty—would have objected that her face was too wide, and her chin too square. Her hair, which was of a bright brown, grew with a singular strength and crispness round a brow which was serene and square. In her eyes there shone the light of tenacity, and a steady purpose. A student of human nature must have regretted that the soul looking out of such eyes should have been vouchsafed to a woman. For strength and purpose in a man are usually exercised for the good of mankind, while in a woman such qualities must, it would seem, benefit no more than one man of her own generation, and a few who may follow her in the next.
“There is nothing,” she said, turning to her book again, “for a man to do in Farlingford.”
“And for a woman—?” inquired Barebone, without looking at her.
“There is always something—everywhere.”
And Septimus Marvin's reflective “Yes—yes,” as he paused in his walk and looked seaward, came in appropriately as a grave confirmation of Miriam's jesting statement.
“Yes—yes,” he repeated, turning toward Barebone, who stood listening to the boy's chatter. “You find us as you left us, Loo. Was it six months ago? Ah! How time flies when one remains stationary. For you, I dare say, it seems more.”
“For me—oh yes, it seems more,” replied Barebone, with his gay laugh, and a glance toward Miriam.
“A little older,” continued the rector. “The church a little mouldier. Farlingford a little emptier. Old Godbold is gone—the last of the Godbolds of Farlingford, which means another empty cottage in the street.”
“I saw it as I came down,” answered Barebone. “They look like last year's nests—those empty cottages. But you have been all well, here at the rectory, since we sailed? The cottages—well, they are only cottages after all.”
Miriam's eyes were raised for a moment from her book.
“Is it like that they talk in France?” she asked. “Are those the sentiments of the great republic?”
Barebone laughed aloud.
“I thought I could make you look up from your book,” he answered. “One has merely to cast a slur upon the poor—your dear poor of Farlingford—and you are up in arms in an instant. But I am not the person to cast a slur, since I am one of the poor of Farlingford myself, and owe it to charity—to the charity of the rectory—that I can read and write.”
“But it came to you very naturally,” observed Marvin, looking vaguely across the marshes to the roofs of the village, “to suggest that those who live in cottages are of a different race of beings—”
He broke off, following his own thoughts in silence, as men soon learn to do who have had no companion by them capable of following whithersoever they may lead.
“Did it?” asked Barebone, sharply. He turned to look at his old friend and mentor with a sudden quick distress. “I hope not. I hope it did not sound like that. For you have never taught me such thoughts, have you? Quite the contrary. And I cannot have learned it from Clubbe.”
He broke off with a laugh of relief, for he had perceived that Septimus Marvin's thoughts were already elsewhere.
“Perhaps you are right,” he added, turning to Miriam. “It may be that one should go to a republic in order to learn—once for all—that all men are not equal.”
“You say it with so much conviction,” was the retort, “that you must have known it before.”
“But I do not know it. I deny such knowledge. Where could I have learned such a principle?”
He spread out his arms in emphatic denial. For he was quick in all his gestures—quick to laugh or be grave—quick, with the rapidity of a woman to catch a thought held back by silence or concealed in speech.
Marvin merely looked at him with a dreamy smile and lapsed again into those speculations which filled his waking moments; for the business of life never received his full attention. He contemplated the world from afar off, and was like that blind man at Bethsaida who saw men as trees walking, and rubbed his eyes and wondered. He turned at the sound of the church clock and looked at his son, whose attitude towards Barebone was that of an admiring younger brother.
“Sep,” he said, “your extra half-hour has passed. You will have time to-morrow and for many days to come to exchange views with Loo.”
The boy was old before his time, as the children of elderly parents always are.
“Very well,” he said, with a grave nod. “But you must not tell Loo where those young herons are after I am gone to bed.”
He went slowly toward the house, looking back suspiciously from time to time.
“Herons? no. Why should I? Where are they?” muttered Mr. Marvin, vaguely, and he absent-mindedly followed his son, leaving Miriam Liston sitting in the turf shelter, built like an embrasure in the dyke, and Barebone standing a little distance from her, looking at her.
A silence fell upon them—the silence that follows the departure of a third person when those who are left behind turn a new page. Miriam laid her book upon her lap and looked across the river now slowly turning to its ebb. She did not look at Barebone, but her eyes were conscious of his proximity. Her attitude, like his, seemed to indicate the knowledge that this moment had been inevitable from the first, and that there was no desire on either part to avoid it or to hasten its advent.
“I had a haunting fear as we came up the river,” he said at length, quietly and with an odd courtesy of manner, “that you might have gone away. That is the calamity always hanging over this quiet house.”
He spoke with the ease of manner which always indicates a long friendship, or a close camaraderie, resulting from common interests or a common endeavour.
“Why should I go away?” she asked.
“On the other hand, why should you stay?”
“Because I fancy I am wanted,” she replied, in the lighter tone which he had used. “It is gratifying to one's vanity, you know, whether it be true or not.”
“Oh, it is true enough. One cannot imagine what they would do without you.”
He was watching Septimus Marvin as he spoke. Sep had joined him and was walking gravely by his side toward the house. They were ill-assorted.
“But there is a limit even to self-sacrifice and—well, there is another world open to you.”
She gave a curt laugh as if he had touched a topic upon which they would disagree.
“Oh—yes,” he laughed. “I leave myself open to a tu quoque, I know. There are other worlds open to me also, you would say.”
He looked at her with his gay and easy smile; but she made no answer, and her resolute lips closed together sharply. The subject had been closed by some past conversation or incident which had left a memory.
“Who are those two men staying at 'The Black Sailor'”, she asked, changing the subject, or only turning into a by-way, perhaps. “You saw them.”
She seemed to take it for granted that he should have seen them, though he had not appeared to look in their direction.
“Oh—yes. I saw them, but I do not know who they are. I came straight here as soon as I could.”
“One of them is a Frenchman,” she said, taking no heed of the excuse given for his ignorance of Farlingford news.
“The old man—I thought so. I felt it when I looked at him. It was perhaps a fellow feeling. I suppose I am a Frenchman after all. Clubbe always says I am one when I am at the wheel and let the ship go off the wind.”
Miriam was looking along the dyke, peering into the gathering darkness.
“One of them is coming toward us now,” she said, almost warningly. “Not the Marquis de Gemosac, but the other—the Englishman.”
“Confound him,” muttered Barebone. “What does he want?”
And to judge from Mr. Dormer Colville's pace it would appear that he chiefly desired to interrupt their tete-a-tete.
CHAPTER VI. THE STORY OF THE CASTAWAYS
When River Andrew stated that there were few at Farlingford who knew more of Frenchman than himself, it is to be presumed that he spoke by the letter, and under the reserve that Captain Clubbe was not at the moment on shore.
For Captain Clubbe had known Frenchman since boyhood.
“I understand,” said Dormer Colville to him two or three days after the arrival of “The Last Hope,” “that the Marquis de Gemosac cannot do better than apply to you for some information he desires to possess. In fact, it is on that account that we are here.”
The introduction had been a matter requiring patience. For Captain Clubbe had not laid aside in his travels a certain East Anglian distrust of the unknown. He had, of course, noted the presence of the strangers when he landed at Farlingford quay, but his large, immobile face had betrayed no peculiar interest. There had been plenty to tell him all that was known of Monsieur de Gemosac and Dormer Colville, and a good deal that was only surmised. But the imagination of even the darksome River Andrew failed to soar successfully under the measuring blue eye, and the total lack of comment of Captain Clubbe.
There was, indeed, little to tell, although the strangers had been seen to go to the rectory in quite a friendly way, and had taken a glass of sherry in the rector's study. Mrs. Clacy was responsible for this piece of news, and her profession giving her the entree to almost every back door in Farlingford enabled her to gather news at the fountain-head. For Mrs. Clacy went out to oblige. She obliged the rectory on Mondays, and Mrs. Clubbe, with what was technically described as the heavy wash, on Tuesdays. Whatever Mrs. Clacy was asked to do she could perform with a rough efficiency. But she always undertook it with reluctance. It was not, she took care to mention, what she was accustomed to, but she would do it to oblige. Her charge was eighteen-pence a day with her dinner, and (she made the addition with a raised eyebrow, and the resigned sigh of one who takes her meals as a duty toward those dependent on her) a bit of tea at the end of the day.
It was on a Wednesday that Dormer Colville met Captain Clubbe face to face in the street, and was forced to curb his friendly smile and half-formed nod of salutation. For Captain Clubbe went past him with a rigid face and steadily averted eyes, like a walking monument. For there was something in the captain's deportment dimly suggestive of stone, and the dignity of stillness. His face meant security, his large limbs a slow, sure action.
Colville and Monsieur de Gemosac were on the quay in the afternoon at high tide when “The Last Hope” was warped on to the slip-way. All Farlingford was there too, and Captain Clubbe carried out the difficult task with hardly any words at all from a corner of the jetty, with Loo Barebone on board as second in command.
Captain Clubbe could not fail to perceive the strangers, for they stood a few yards from him, Monsieur de Gemosac peering with his yellow eyes toward the deck of “The Last Hope,” where Barebone stood on the forecastle giving the orders transmitted to him by a sign from his taciturn captain. Colville seemed to take a greater interest in the proceedings, and noted the skill and precision of the crew with the air of a seaman.
Presently, Septimus Marvin wandered down the dyke and stood irresolutely at the far corner of the jetty. He always approached his flock with diffidence, although they treated him kindly enough, much as they treated such of their own children as were handicapped in the race of life by some malformation or mental incapacity.
Colville approached him and they stood side by side until “The Last Hope” was safely moored and chocked. Then it was that the rector introduced the two strangers to Captain Clubbe. It being a Wednesday, Clubbe must have known all that there was to know, and more, of Monsieur de Gemosac and Dormer Colville; for Mrs. Clacy, it will be remembered, obliged Mrs. Clubbe on Tuesdays. Nothing, however, in the mask-like face, large and square, of the ship-captain indicated that he knew aught of his new acquaintances, or desired to know more. And when Colville frankly explained their presence in Farlingford, Captain Clubbe nodded gravely and that was all.
“We can wait, however, until a more suitable opportunity presents itself,” Colville hastened to add. “You are busy, as even a landsman can perceive, and cannot be expected to think of anything but your vessel until the tide leaves her high and dry.”
He turned and explained the situation to the Marquis, who shrugged his shoulders impatiently as if at the delay. For he was a southerner, and was, perhaps, ignorant of the fact that in dealing with any born on the shores of the German Ocean nothing is gained and, more often than not, all is lost by haste.
“You hear,” Colville added, turning to the Captain, and speaking in a curter manner; for so strongly was he moved by that human kindness which is vaguely called sympathy that his speech varied according to his listener. “You hear the Marquis only speaks French. It is about a fellow countryman of his buried here. Drop in and have a glass of wine with us some evening; to-night, if you are at liberty.”
“What I can tell you won't take long,” said Clubbe, over his shoulder; for the tide was turning, and in a few minutes would be ebbing fast.
“Dare say not. But we have a good bin of claret at 'The Black Sailor,' and shall be glad of your opinion on it.”
Clubbe nodded, with a curt laugh, which might have been intended to deprecate the possession of any opinion on a vintage, or to express his disbelief that Dormer Colville desired to have it.
Nevertheless, his large person loomed in the dusk of the trees soon after sunset, in the narrow road leading from his house to the church and the green.
Monsieur de Gemosac and his companion were sitting on the bench outside the inn, leaning against the sill of their own parlour-window, which stood open. The Captain had changed his clothes, and now wore those in which he went to church and to the custom-house when in London or other large cities.
“There walks a just man,” commented Dormer Colville, lightly, and no longer word could have described Captain Clubbe more aptly. He would rather have stayed in his own garden this evening to smoke his pipe in contemplative silence. But he had always foreseen that the day might come when it would be his duty to do his best by Loo Barebone. He had not sought this opportunity, because, being a wise as well as a just man, he was not quite sure that he knew what the best would be.
He shook hands gravely with the strangers, and by his manner seemed to indicate his comprehension of Monsieur de Gemosac's well-turned phrases of welcome. Dormer Colville appeared to be in a silent humour, unless perchance he happened to be one of those rare beings who can either talk or hold their tongues as occasion may demand.
“You won't want me to put my oar in, I see,” observed he, tentatively, as he drew forward a small table whereon were set three glasses and a bottle of the celebrated claret.
“I can understand French, but I don't talk it,” replied the Captain, stolidly.
“And if I interpret as we go along, we shall sit here all night, and get very little said.”
Colville explained the difficulty to the Marquis de Gemosac, and agreed with him that much time would be saved if Captain Clubbe would be kind enough to tell in English all that he knew of the nameless Frenchman buried in Farlingford churchyard, to be translated by Colville to Monsieur de Gemosac at another time. As Clubbe understood this, and nodded in acquiescence, there only remained to them to draw the cork and light their cigars.
“Not much to tell,” said Clubbe, guardedly. “But what there is, is no secret, so far as I know. It has not been told because it was known long ago, and has been forgotten since. The man's dead and buried, and there's an end of him.”
“Of him, yes, but not of his race,” answered Colville.
“You mean the lad?” inquired the Captain, turning his calm and steady gaze to Colville's face. The whole man seemed to turn, ponderously and steadily, like a siege-gun.
“That is what I meant,” answered Colville. “You understand,” he went on to explain, as if urged thereto by the fixed glance of the clear blue eye—“you understand, it is none of my business. I am only here as the Marquis de Gemosac's friend. Know him in his own country, where I live most of the time.”
Clubbe nodded.
“Frenchman was picked up at sea fifty-five years ago this July,” he narrated, bluntly, “by the 'Martha and Mary' brig of this port. I was apprentice at the time. Frenchman was a boy with fair hair and a womanish face. Bit of a cry-baby I used to think him, but being a boy myself I was perhaps hard on him. He was with his—well, his mother.”
Captain Clubbe paused. He took the cigar from his lips and carefully replaced the outer leaf, which had wrinkled. Perhaps he waited to be asked a question. Colville glanced at him sideways and did not ask it.
“Dark night,” the Captain continued, after a short silence, “and a heavy sea, about mid-channel off Dieppe. We sighted a French fishing-boat yawing about abandoned. Something queer about her, the skipper thought. Those were queer times in France. We hailed her, and getting no answer put out a boat and boarded her. There was nobody on board but a woman and a child. Woman was half mad with fear. I have seen many afraid, but never one like that. I was only a boy myself, but I remember thinking it wasn't the sea and drowning she was afraid of. We couldn't find out the smack's name. It had been painted out with a tar-brush, and she was half full of water. The skipper took the woman and child off, and left the fishing-smack as we found her yawing about—all sail set. They reckoned she would founder in a few minutes. But there was one old man on board, the boatswain, who had seen many years at sea, who said that she wasn't making any water at all, because he had been told to look for the leak and couldn't find it. He said that the water had been pumped into her so as to waterlog her; and it was his belief that she had not been abandoned many minutes, that the crew were hanging about somewhere near in a boat waiting to see if we sighted her and put men on board.”
Mr. Dormer Colville was attending to the claret, and pressed Captain Clubbe by a gesture of the hand to empty his glass.
“Something wrong somewhere?” he suggested, in a conversational way.
“By daylight we were ramping up channel with three French men-of-war after us,” was Captain Clubbe's comprehensive reply. “As chance had it, the channel squadron hove in sight round the Foreland, and the Frenchmen turned and left us.”
Clubbe marked a pause in his narrative by a glass of claret taken at one draught like beer.
“Skipper was a Farlingford man, name of Doy,” he continued. “Long as he lived he was pestered by inquiries from the French government respecting a Dieppe fishing-smack supposed to have been picked up abandoned at sea. He had picked up no fishing-smack, and he answered no letters about it. He was an old man when it happened, and he died at sea soon after my indentures expired. The woman and child were brought here, where nobody could speak French, and, of course, neither of them could speak any English. The boy was white-faced and frightened at first, but he soon picked up spirit. They were taken in and cared for by one and another—any who could afford it. For Farlingford has always bred seafaring men ready to give and take.”
“So we were told yesterday by the rector. We had a long talk with him in the morning. A clever man, if—”
Dormer Colville did not complete the remark, but broke off with a sigh. He had no doubt seen trouble himself. For it is not always the ragged and unkempt who have been sore buffeted by the world, but also such as have a clean-washed look almost touching sleekness.
“Yes,” said Clubbe, slowly and conclusively. “So you have seen the parson.”
“Of course,” Colville remarked, cheerfully, after a pause; for we cannot always be commiserating the unfortunate. “Of course, all this happened before his time, and Monsieur de Gemosac does not want to learn from hearsay, you understand, but at first hand. I fancy he would, for instance, like to know when the woman, the—mother died.”
Clubbe was looking straight in front of him. He turned in his disconcerting, monumental way and looked at his questioner, who had imitated with a perfect ingenuousness his own brief pause before the word mother. Colville smiled pleasantly at him.
“I tell you frankly, Captain,” he said, “it would suit me better if she wasn't the mother.”
“I am not here to suit you,” murmured Captain Clubbe, without haste or hesitation.
“No. Well, let us say for the present that she was the mother. We can discuss that another time. When did she die?”
“Seven years after landing here.”
Colville made a mental calculation and nodded his head with satisfaction at the end of it. He lighted another cigarette.
“I am a business man, Captain,” he said at length. “Fair dealing and a clean bond. That is what I have been brought up to. Confidence for confidence. Before we go any further—” He paused and seemed to think before committing himself. Perhaps he saw that Captain Clubbe did not intend to go much further without some quid pro quo. “Before we go any further, I think I may take it upon myself to let you into the Marquis's confidence. It is about an inheritance, Captain. A great inheritance and—well, that young fellow may well be the man. He may be born to greater things than a seafaring life, Captain.”
“I don't want any marquis to tell me that,” answered Clubbe, with his slow judicial smile. “For I've brought him up since the cradle. He's been at sea with me in fair weather and foul—and he is not the same as us.”