The Last Hope Part 7

"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 pa.s.s 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. G.o.d 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 sh.o.r.e. 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 sh.o.r.e, and had never departed from that a.s.severation 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 t.i.tle.

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."

CHAPTER VIII

THE LITTLE BOY WHO WAS A KING

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 circ.u.mstances would a.s.suredly 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.

"Pa.s.sen 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 gra.s.s 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, spa.r.s.ely 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 G.o.dliness. 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 fas.h.i.+onable 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 pa.s.sed 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.