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The Last Hope

by Henry Seton Merriman · English · Gutenberg #8942 · 556,455 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Last Hope

Author: Henry Seton Merriman


        
Release date: September 1, 2005 [eBook #8942]
                Most recently updated: August 24, 2014

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8942

Credits: Etext produced by Jonathan Ingram, Mary Meehan and Distributed Proofreaders
        
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LAST HOPE ***




Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Mary Meehan and Distributed Proofreaders









                              THE LAST HOPE

                                   BY
                           HENRY SETON MERRIMAN




  "What is it thou knowest, sweet voice?" I cried.
  "A hidden hope," the voice replied.




CONTENTS

CHAPTER

       I. LE ROI EST MORT

      II. VIVE LE ROI

     III. THE RETURN OF "THE LAST HOPE"

      IV. THE MARQUIS'S CREED

       V. ON THE DYKE

      VI. THE STORY OF THE CASTAWAYS

     VII. ON THE SCENT

    VIII. THE LITTLE BOY WHO WAS A KING

      IX. A MISTAKE

       X. IN THE ITALIAN HOUSE

      XI. A BEGINNING

     XII. THE SECRET OF GEMOSAC

    XIII. WITHIN THE GATES

     XIV. THE LIFTED VEIL

      XV. THE TURN OF THE TIDE

     XVI. THE GAMBLERS

    XVII. ON THE PONT ROYAL

   XVIII. THE CITY THAT SOON FORGETS

     XIX. IN THE BREACH

      XX. "NINETEEN"

     XXI. NO. 8 RUELLE ST. JACOB

    XXII. DROPPING THE PILOT

   XXIII. A SIMPLE BANKER

    XXIV. THE LANE OF MANY TURNINGS

     XXV. SANS RANCUNE

    XXVI. RETURNED EMPTY

   XXVII. OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF BABES

  XXVIII. BAREBONE'S PRICE

    XXIX. IN THE DARK

     XXX. IN THE FURROW AGAIN

    XXXI. THE THURSDAY OF MADAME DE CHANTONNAY

   XXXII. PRIMROSES

  XXXIII. DORMER COLVILLE IS BLIND

   XXXIV. A SORDID MATTER

    XXXV. A SQUARE MAN

   XXXVI. MRS. ST. PIERRE LAWRENCE DOES NOT UNDERSTAND

  XXXVII. AN UNDERSTANDING

 XXXVIII. A COUP-D'ÉTAT

   XXXIX. "JOHN DARBY"

      XL. FARLINGFORD ONCE MORE




THE LAST HOPE




CHAPTER I

LE ROI EST MORT


"There; that's it. That's where they buried Frenchman," said
Andrew--known as River Andrew. For there was another Andrew who earned
his living on the sea.

River Andrew had conducted the two gentlemen from "The Black Sailor" to
the churchyard by their own request. A message had been sent to him in
the morning that this service would be required of him, to which he had
returned the answer that they would have to wait until the evening. It
was his day to go round Marshford way with dried fish, he said; but in
the evening they could see the church if they still set their minds on
it.

River Andrew combined the light duties of grave-digger and clerk to the
parish of Farlingford in Suffolk with a small but steady business in fish
of his own drying, nets of his own netting, and pork slain and dressed by
his own weather-beaten hands.

For Farlingford lies in that part of England which reaches seaward toward
the Fatherland, and seems to have acquired from that proximity an
insatiable appetite for sausages and pork. On these coasts the killing of
pigs and the manufacture of sausages would appear to employ the leisure
of the few, who for one reason or another have been deemed unfit for the
sea. It is not our business to inquire why River Andrew had never used
the fickle element. All that lay in the past. And in a degree he was
saved from the disgrace of being a landsman by the smell of tar and
bloaters that heralded his coming, by the blue jersey and the brown
homespun trousers which he wore all the week, and by the saving word
which distinguished him from the poor inland lubbers who had no dealings
with water at all.

He had this evening laid aside his old sou'wester--worn in fair and foul
weather alike--for his Sunday hat. His head-part was therefore official
and lent additional value to the words recorded. He spoke them, moreover,
with a dim note of aggressiveness which might only have been racy of a
soil breeding men who are curt and clear of speech. But there was more
than an East Anglian bluffness in the statement and the manner of its
delivery, as his next observation at once explained.

"Passen thinks it's over there by the yew-tree--but he's wrong. That
there one was a wash-up found by old Willem the lighthouse keeper one
morning early. No! this is where Frenchman was laid by."

He indicated with the toe of his sea-boot a crumbling grave which had
never been distinguished by a headstone. The grass grew high all over
Farlingford churchyard, almost hiding the mounds where the forefathers
slept side by side with the nameless "wash-ups," to whom they had
extended a last hospitality.

River Andrew had addressed his few remarks to the younger of his two
companions, a well-dressed, smartly set-up man of forty or thereabouts,
who in turn translated the gist of them into French for the information
of his senior, a little white-haired gentleman whom he called "Monsieur
le Marquis."

He spoke glibly enough in either tongue, with a certain indifference of
manner. This was essentially a man of cities, and one better suited to
the pavement than the rural quiet of Farlingford. To have the gift of
tongues is no great recommendation to the British born, and River Andrew
looked askance at this fine gentleman while he spoke French. He had
received letters at the post-office under the name of Dormer Colville: a
name not unknown in London and Paris, but of which the social fame had
failed to travel even to Ipswich, twenty miles away from this mouldering
churchyard.

"It's getting on for twenty-five years come Michaelmas," put in River
Andrew. "I wasn't digger then; but I remember the burial well enough. And
I remember Frenchman--same as if I see him yesterday."

He plucked a blade of grass from the grave and placed it between his
teeth.

"He were a mystery, he were," he added, darkly, and turned to look
musingly across the marshes toward the distant sea. For River Andrew,
like many hawkers of cheap wares, knew the indirect commercial value of
news.

The little white-haired Frenchman made a gesture of the shoulders and
outspread hands indicative of a pious horror at the condition of this
neglected grave. The meaning of his attitude was so obvious that River
Andrew shifted uneasily from one foot to the other.

"Passen," he said, "he don't take no account of the graves. He's what you
might call a bookworm. Always a sitting indoors reading books and
pictures. Butcher Franks turns his sheep in from time to time. But along
of these tempests and the hot sun the grass has shot up a bit.
Frenchman's no worse off than others. And there's some as are fallen in
altogether."

He indicated one or two graves where the mound had sunk, and suggestive
hollows were visible in the grass. "First, it's the coffin that bu'sts in
beneath the weight, then it's the bones," he added, with that grim
realism which is begotten of familiarity.

Dormer Colville did not trouble to translate these general truths. He
suppressed a yawn as he contemplated the tottering headstones of certain
master-mariners and Trinity-pilots taking their long rest in the
immediate vicinity. The churchyard lay on the slope of rising ground upon
which the village of Farlingford straggled upward in one long street.
Farlingford had once been a town of some commercial prosperity. Its story
was the story of half a dozen ports on this coast--a harbour silted up, a
commerce absorbed by a more prosperous neighbour nearer to the railway.

Below the churchyard was the wide street which took a turn eastward at
the gates and led straight down to the river-side. Farlingford Quay--a
little colony of warehouses and tarred huts--was separated from
Farlingford proper by a green, where the water glistened at high tide. In
olden days the Freemen of Farlingford had been privileged to graze their
horses on the green. In these later times the lord of the manor pretended
to certain rights over the pasturage, which Farlingford, like one man,
denied him.

"A mystery," repeated River Andrew, waiting very clearly for Mr. Dormer
Colville to translate the suggestive word to the French gentleman. But
Colville only yawned. "And there's few in Farlingford as knew Frenchman
as well as I did."

Mr. Colville walked toward the church porch, which seemed to appeal to
his sense of the artistic; for he studied the Norman work with the eye of
a connoisseur. He was evidently a cultured man, more interested in a work
of art than in human story.

River Andrew, seeing him depart, jingled the keys which he carried in his
hand, and glanced impatiently toward the older man. The Marquis de
Gemosac, however, ignored the sound as completely as he had ignored River
Andrew's remarks. He was looking round him with eyes which had once been
dark and bright, and were now dimly yellow. He looked from tomb to tomb,
vainly seeking one that should be distinguished, if only by the
evidence of a little care at the hands of the living. He looked down the
wide grass-grown street--partly paved after the manner of the
Netherlands--toward the quay, where the brown river gleamed between the
walls of the weather-beaten brick buildings. There was a ship lying at
the wharf, half laden with hay; a coasting craft from some of the greater
tidal rivers, the Orwell or the Blackwater. A man was sitting on a piece
of timber on the quay, smoking as he looked seaward. But there was no one
else in sight. For Farlingford was half depopulated, and it was tea-time.
Across the river lay the marshes, unbroken by tree or hedge, barren of
even so much as a hut. In the distance, hazy and grey in the eye of the
North Sea, a lighthouse stood dimly, like a pillar of smoke. To the
south--so far as the eye could pierce the sea haze--marshes. To the
north--where the river ran between bare dykes--marshes.

And withal a silence which was only intensified by the steady hum of the
wind through the gnarled branches of the few churchyard trees which turn
a crouching back toward the ocean.

In all the world--save, perhaps, in the Arctic world--it would be hard to
find a picture emphasising more clearly the fact that a man's life is but
a small matter, and the memory of it like the seed of grass upon the wind
to be blown away and no more recalled.

The bearer of one of the great names of France stood knee-deep in the
sun-tanned grass and looked slowly round as if seeking to imprint the
scene upon his memory. He turned to glance at the crumbling church behind
him, built long ago by men speaking the language in which his own
thoughts found shape. He looked slowly from end to end of the ill-kept
burial ground, crowded with the bones of the nameless and insignificant
dead, who, after a life passed in the daily struggle to wrest a
sufficiency of food from a barren soil, or the greater struggle to hold
their own against a greedy sea, had faded from the memory of the living,
leaving naught behind them but a little mound where the butcher put his
sheep to graze.

Monsieur de Gemosac was so absorbed in his reflections that he seemed to
forget his surroundings and stood above the grave, pointed out to him by
River Andrew, oblivious to the cold wind that blew in from the sea, deaf
to the clink of the sexton's inviting keys, forgetful of his companion
who stood patiently waiting within the porch. The Marquis was a little
bent man, spare of limb, heavy of shoulder, with snow-white hair against
which his skin, brown and wrinkled as a walnut shell, looked sallow like
old ivory. His face was small and aquiline; not the face of a clever man,
but clearly the face of an aristocrat. He had the grand manner too, and
that quiet air of self-absorption which usually envelops the bearers of
historic names.

Dormer Colville watched him with a good-natured patience which pointed,
as clearly as his attitude and yawning indifference, to the fact that he
was not at Farlingford for his own amusement. Presently he lounged back
again toward the Marquis and stood behind him. "The wind is cold,
Marquis," he said, pleasantly. "One of the coldest spots in England. What
would Mademoiselle say if I allowed you to take a chill?"

De Gemosac turned and looked at him over his shoulder with a smile full
of pathetic meaning. He spread out his arms in a gesture indicative of
horror at the bleakness of the surroundings; at the mournfulness of the
decaying village; the dreary hopelessness of the mouldering church and
tombs.

"I was thinking, my friend," he said. "That was all. It is not surprising
... that one should think."

Colville heaved a sigh and said nothing. He was, it seemed, essentially a
sympathetic man; not of a thoughtful habit himself, but tolerant of
thought in others. It was abominably windy and cold, although the corn
was beginning to ripen; but he did not complain. Neither did he desire to
hurry his companion in any way.

He looked at the crumbling grave with a passing shadow in his clever and
worldly eyes, and composed himself to await his friend's pleasure.

In his way he must have been a philosopher. His attitude did not suggest
that he was bored, and yet it was obvious that he was eminently out of
place in this remote spot. He had nothing in common, for instance, with
River Andrew, and politely yawned that reminiscent fish-curer into
silence. His very clothes were of a cut and fashion never before seen in
Farlingford. He wore them, too, with an air rarely assumed even in the
streets of Ipswich.

Men still dressed with care at this time; for d'Orsay was not yet dead,
though his fame was tarnished. Mr. Dormer Colville was not a dandy,
however. He was too clever to go to that extreme and too wise not to be
within reach of it in an age when great tailors were great men, and it
was quite easy to make a reputation by clothes alone.

Not only was his dress too fine for Farlingford, but his personality was
not in tune with this forgotten end of England. His movements were too
quick for a slow-moving race of men; no fools, and wiser than their
midland brethren; slow because they had yet to make sure that a better
way of life had been discovered than that way in which their Saxon
forefathers had always walked.

Colville seemed to look at the world with an exploiting eye. He had a
speculative mind. Had he lived at the end of the Victorian era instead of
the beginning he might have been a notable financier. His quick glance
took in all Farlingford in one comprehensive verdict. There was nothing
to be made of it. It was uninteresting because it obviously had no
future, nor encouraged any enterprise. He looked across the marshes
indifferently, following the line of the river as it made its devious way
between high dykes to the sea. And suddenly his eye lighted. There was a
sail to the south. A schooner was standing in to the river mouth, her
sails glowing rosily in the last of the sunset light.

Colville turned to see whether River Andrew had noticed, and saw that
landsman looking skyward with an eye that seemed to foretell the early
demise of a favouring wind.

"That's 'The Last Hope,'" he said, in answer to Dormer Colville's
question. "And it will take all Seth Clubbe's seamanship to save the
tide. 'The Last Hope.' There's many a 'Hope,' built at Farlingford, and
that's the last, for the yard is closed and there's no more building
now."

The Marquis de Gemosac had turned away from the grave, but as Colville
approached him he looked back to it with a shake of the head.

"After eight centuries of splendour, my friend," he said. "Can that be
the end--that?"

"It is not the end," answered Colville, cheerfully, "It is only the end
of a chapter. _Le roi est mort--vive le roi!_"

He pointed with his stick, as he spoke, to the schooner creeping in
between the dykes.




CHAPTER II

VIVE LE ROI


"The Last Hope" had been expected for some days. It was known in
Farlingford that she was foul, and that Captain Clubbe had decided to put
her on the slip-way at the end of the next voyage. Captain Clubbe was a
Farlingford man. "The Last Hope" was a Farlingford built ship, and Seth
Clubbe was not the captain to go past his own port for the sake of saving
a few pounds.

"Farlingford's his nation," they said of him down at the quay. "Born and
bred here, man and boy. He's not likely to put her into a Thames dry-dock
while the slip-way's standing empty."

All the village gossips naturally connected the arrival of the two
gentlemen from London with the expected return of "The Last Hope."
Captain Clubbe was known to have commercial relations with France. It was
currently reported that he could speak the language. No one could tell
the number of his voyages backward and forward from the Bay to Bristol,
to Yarmouth, and even to Bergen, carrying salt-fish to those countries
where their religion bids them eat that which they cannot supply from
their own waters, and bringing back wine from Bordeaux and brandy from
Charente.

It is not etiquette, however, on these wind-swept coasts to inquire too
closely into a man's business, and, as in other places, the talk was
mostly among those who knew the least--namely, the women. There had been
a question of repairing the church. The generation now slowly finding its
way to its precincts had discussed the matter since their childhood and
nothing had come of it.

One bold spirit put forth the suggestion that the two gentlemen were
London architects sent down by the Queen to see to the church. But the
idea fell to the ground before the assurance from Mrs. Clopton's own lips
that the old gentleman was nothing but a Frenchman.

Mrs. Clopton kept "The Black Sailor," and knew a deal more than she was
ready to tell people; which is tantamount to saying that she was a woman
in a thousand. It had leaked out, however, that the spokesman of the
party, Mr. Dormer Colville, had asked Mrs. Clopton whether it was true
that there was claret in the cellars of "The Black Sailor." And any one
having doubts could satisfy himself with a sight of the empty bottles,
all mouldy, standing in the back yard of the inn.

They were wine-merchants from France, concluded the wiseacres of
Farlingford over their evening beer. They had come to Farlingford to see
Captain Clubbe. What could be more natural! For Farlingford was proud of
Captain Clubbe. It so often happens that a man going out into the world
and making a great name there, forgets his birthplace and the rightful
claim to a gleam of reflected glory which the relations of a great
man--who have themselves stayed at home and done nothing--are always
ready to consider their due reward for having shaken their heads over him
during the earlier struggles.

Though slow of tongue, the men of Farlingford were of hospitable
inclination. They were sorry for Frenchmen, as for a race destined to
smart for all time under the recollection of many disastrous defeats at
sea. And of course they could not help being ridiculous. Heaven had made
them like that while depriving them of any hope of ever attaining to good
seamanship. Here was a foreigner, however, cast up in their midst, not by
the usual channel indeed, but by a carriage and pair from Ipswich. He
must feel lonesome, they thought, and strange. They, therefore, made an
effort to set him at his ease, and when they met him in "the street"
jerked their heads at him sideways. The upward jerk is less friendly and
usually denotes the desire to keep strictly within the limits of
acquaintanceship. To Mr. Dormer Colville they gave the upward lift of the
chin as to a person too facile in speech to be desirable.

The dumbness of the Marquis do Gemosac appealed perhaps to a race of
seafaring men very sparingly provided by nature with words in which to
clothe thoughts no less solid and sensible by reason of their terseness.
It was at all events unanimously decided that everything should be done
to make the foreigner welcome until the arrival of "The Last Hope." A
similar unanimity characterised the decision that he must without delay
be shown Frenchman's grave.

River Andrew's action and the unprecedented display of his Sunday hat on
a week-day were nothing but the outcome of a deep-laid scheme. Mrs.
Clopton had been instructed to recommend the gentlemen to inspect the
church, and the rest had been left to the wit of River Andrew, a man
whose calling took him far and wide, and gave him opportunities of speech
with gentlefolk.

These opportunities tempted River Andrew to go beyond his instructions so
far as to hint that he could, if encouraged, make disclosures of interest
respecting Frenchman. Which was untrue; for River Andrew knew no more
than the rest of Farlingford of a man who, having been literally cast up
by the sea at their gates, had lived his life within those gates, had
married a Farlingford woman, and had at last gone the way of all
Farlingford without telling any who or what he was.

From sundry open cottage doors and well-laden tea-tables glances of
inquiry were directed toward the strangers' faces as they walked down the
street after having viewed the church. Some prescient females went so far
as to state that they could see quite distinctly in the elder gentleman's
demeanour a sense of comfort and consolation at the knowledge thus
tactfully conveyed to him that he was not the first of his kind to be
seen in Farlingford.

Hard upon the heels of the visitors followed River Andrew, wearing his
sou'wester now and carrying the news that "The Last Hope" was coming up
on the top of the tide.

Farlingford lies four miles from the mouth of the river, and no ship
can well arrive unexpected at the quay; for the whole village may see
her tacking up under shortened sail, heading all ways, sometimes
close-hauled, and now running free as she follows the zigzags of the
river.

Thus, from the open door, the villagers calculated the chances of being
able to finish the evening meal at leisure and still be down at the quay
in time to see Seth Clubbe bring his ship alongside. One by one the men
of Farlingford, pipe in mouth, went toward the river, not forgetting the
kindly, sideward jerk of the head for the old Frenchman already waiting
there.

It was nearly the top of the tide and the clear green water swelled and
gurgled round the weedy piles of the quay, bringing on its surface tokens
from the sea--shadowy jelly-fish, weed, and froth. "The Last Hope" was
quite close at hand now, swinging up in mid-stream. The sun had set and
over the marshes the quiet of evening brooded hazily. Captain Clubbe had
taken in all sail except a jib. His anchor was swinging lazily overside,
ready to drop. The watchers on the quay could note the gentle rise and
fall of the crack little vessel as the tide lifted her from behind. She
seemed to be dancing to her home like a maiden back from school. The
swing of her tapering masts spoke of the heaving seas she had left
behind.

It was characteristic of Farlingford that no one spoke. River Andrew was
already in his boat, ready to lend a hand should Captain Clubbe wish to
send a rope ashore. But it was obvious that the captain meant to anchor
in the stream for the night: so obvious that if any one on shore had
mentioned the conclusion his speech would have called for nothing but a
contemptuous glance from the steady blue eyes all round him.

It was equally characteristic of a Farlingford ship that there were no
greetings from the deck. Those on shore could clearly perceive the burly
form of Captain Clubbe, standing by the weather rigging. Wives could
distinguish their husbands, and girls their lovers; but, as these were
attending to their business with a taciturn concentration, no hand was
raised in salutation.

The wind had dropped now. For these are coasts of quiet nights and
boisterous days. The tide was almost slack. "The Last Hope" was scarcely
moving, and in the shadowy light looked like a phantom ship sailing out
of a dreamy sunset sky.

Suddenly the silence was broken, so unexpectedly, so dramatically, that
the old Frenchman, to whose nature such effects would naturally appeal
with a lightning speed, rose to his feet and stood looking with startled
eyes toward the ship. A clear strong voice had broken joyously into song,
and the words it sang were French:

"C'est le Hasard,
Qui, tôt ou tard,
Ici bas nous seconde;
Car,
D'un bout du monde
A l'autre bout,
Le Hasard seul fait tout."

Not only were the words incongruous with their quaint, sadly gay air of a
dead epoch of music and poetry; but the voice was in startling contrast
to the tones of a gruff and slow-speaking people. For it was a clear
tenor voice with a ring of emotion in it, half laughter, half tears, such
as no Briton could compass himself, or hear in another without a dumb
feeling of shame and shyness.

But those who heard it on the shore--and all Farlingford was there by
this time--only laughed curtly. Some of the women exchanged a glance and
made imperfectly developed gestures, as of a tolerance understood between
mothers for anything that is young and inconsequent.

"We've gotten Loo Barebone back at any rate," said a man, bearing the
reputation of a wit. And after a long pause one or two appreciators
answered:

"You're right," and laughed good-humouredly.

The Marquis de Gemosac sat down again, with a certain effort at
self-control, on the balk of timber which had been used by some
generations of tide-watchers. He turned and exchanged a glance with
Dormer Colville, who stood at his side leaning on his gold-headed cane.
Colville's expression seemed to say:

"I told you what it would be. But wait: there is more to come."

His affable eyes made a round of the watching faces, and even exchanged a
sympathetic smile with some, as if to hint that his clothes were only
fine because he belonged to a fine generation, but that his heart was as
human as any beating under a homelier coat.

"There's Passen," said one woman to another, behind the corner of her
apron, within Colville's hearing. "It takes a deal to bring him out o'
doors nowadays, and little Sep and--Miss Miriam."

Dormer Colville heard the words. And he heard something unspoken in the
pause before the mention of the last name. He did not look at once in the
direction indicated by a jerk of the speaker's thumb, but waited until a
change of position enabled him to turn his head without undue curiosity.
He threw back his shoulders and stretched his legs after the manner of
one cramped by standing too long in one attitude.

A hundred yards farther up the river, where the dyke was wider, a
grey-haired man was walking slowly toward the quay. In front of him a boy
of ten years was endeavouring to drag a young girl toward the jetty at a
quicker pace than she desired. She was laughing at his impetuosity and
looking back toward the man who followed them with the abstraction and
indifference of a student.

Colville took in the whole picture in one quick comprehensive glance. But
he turned again as the singer on board "The Last Hope" began another
verse. The words were clearly audible to such as knew the language, and
Colville noted that the girl turned with a sudden gravity to listen to
them.

"Un tel qu'on vantait
Par hasard était
D'origine assez minoe;
Par hasard il plut,
Par hasard il fut
Baron, ministre, et prince."

Captain Clubbe's harsh voice broke into the song with the order to let go
the anchor. As the ship swung to the tide the steersman, who wore neither
coat nor waistcoat, could be seen idly handling the wheel still, though
his duties were necessarily at an end. He was a young man, and a gay
salutation of his unemployed hand toward the assembled people--as if he
were sure that they were all friends--stamped him as the light-hearted
singer, so different from the Farlingford men, so strongly contrasted to
his hearers, who nevertheless jerked their heads sideways in response. He
had, it seemed, rightly gauged the feelings of these cold East Anglians.
They were his friends.

River Andrew's boat was alongside "The Last Hope" now. Some one had
thrown him a rope, which he had passed under his bow thwart and now held
with one hand, while with the other he kept his distance from the tarry
side of the ship. There was a pause until the schooner felt her moorings,
then Captain Clubbe looked over the side and nodded a curt salutation to
River Andrew, bidding him, by the same gesture, wait a minute until he
had donned his shore-going jacket. The steersman was pulling on his coat
while he sought among the crowd the faces of his more familiar friends.
He was, it seemed, a privileged person, and took it for granted that he
should go ashore with the captain. He was, perhaps, one of those who
seemed to be privileged at their birth by Fate, and pass through life on
the sunny side with a light step and laughing lips.

Captain Clubbe was the first to step ashore, with one comprehensive nod
of the head for all Farlingford. Close on his heels the younger sailor
was already returning the greetings of his friends.

"Hullo, Loo!" they said; or, "How do, Barebone?" For their tongues are no
quicker than their limbs, and to this day, "How do?" is the usual
greeting.

The Marquis de Gemosac, who was sitting in the background, gave a sharp
little exclamation of surprise when Barebone stepped ashore, and turned
to Dormer Colville to say in an undertone:

"Ah--but you need say nothing."

"I promised you," answered Colville, carelessly, "that I should tell you
nothing till you had seen him."




CHAPTER III

THE RETURN OF "THE LAST HOPE"


Not only France, but all Europe, had at this time to reckon with one who,
if, as his enemies said, was no Bonaparte, was a very plausible imitation
of one.

In 1849 France, indeed, was kind enough to give the world a breathing
space. She had herself just come through one of those seething years from
which she alone seems to have the power of complete recovery. Paris had
been in a state of siege for four months; not threatened by a foreign
foe, but torn to pieces by internal dissension. Sixteen thousand had been
killed and wounded in the streets. A ministry had fallen. A ministry
always does fall in France. Bad weather may bring about such a descent at
any moment. A monarchy had been thrown down--a king had fled. Another
king; and one who should have known better than to put his trust in a
people.

Half a dozen generals had attempted to restore order in Paris and
confidence in France. Then, at the very end of 1848, the fickle people
elected this Napoleon, who was no Bonaparte, President of the new
Republic, and Europe was accorded a breathing space. At the beginning of
1849 arrangements were made for it--military arrangements--and the year
was almost quiet.

It was in the summer of the next year, 1850, that the Marquis de Gemosac
journeyed to England. It was not his first visit to the country. Sixty
years earlier he had been hurried thither by a frenzied mother, a little
pale-faced boy, not bright or clever, but destined to pass through days
of trial and years of sorrow which the bright and clever would scarcely
have survived. For brightness must always mean friction, while cleverness
will continue to butt its head against human limitations so long as men
shall walk this earth.

He had been induced to make this journey thus, in the evening of his
days, by the Hope, hitherto vain enough, which many Frenchmen had pursued
for half a century. For he was one of those who refused to believe that
Louis XVII had died in the prison of the Temple.

Not once, but many times, Dormer Colville laughingly denied any
responsibility in the matter.

"I will not even tell the story as it was told to me," he said to the
Marquis de Gemosac, to the Abbé Touvent and to the Comtesse de
Chantonnay, whom he met frequently enough at the house of his cousin,
Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence, in that which is now the Province of the
Charente Inférieure. "I will not even tell you the story as it was told
to me, until one of you has seen the man. And then, if you ask me, I will
tell you. It is nothing to me, you understand. I am no dreamer, but a
very material person, who lives in France because he loves the sunshine,
and the cuisine, and the good, kind hearts, which no government or want
of government can deteriorate."

And Madame de Chantonnay, who liked Dormer Colville--with whom she
admitted she always felt herself in sympathy--smiled graciously in
response to his gallant bow. For she, too, was a materialist who loved
the sunshine and the cuisine; more especially the cuisine.

Moreover, Colville never persuaded the Marquis de Gemosac to come
to England. He went so far as to represent, in a realistic light,
the discomforts of the journey, and only at the earnest desire of
many persons concerned did he at length enter into the matter and
good-naturedly undertake to accompany the aged traveller.

So far as his story was concerned, he kept his word, entertaining the
Marquis on the journey and during their two days' sojourn at the humble
inn at Farlingford with that flow of sympathetic and easy conversation
which always made Madame de Chantonnay protest that he was no Englishman
at all, but all that there was of the most French. Has it not been seen
that Colville refused to translate the dark sayings of River Andrew by
the side of the grass-grown grave, which seemed to have been brought to
the notice of the travellers by the merest accident?

"I promised you that I should tell you nothing until you had seen him,"
he repeated, as the Marquis followed with his eyes the movements of the
group of which the man they called Loo Barebone formed the centre.

No one took much notice of the two strangers. It is not considered good
manners in a seafaring community to appear to notice a new-comer. Captain
Clubbe was naturally the object of universal attention. Was he not
bringing foreign money into Farlingford, where the local purses needed
replenishing now that trade had fallen away and agriculture was so sorely
hampered by the lack of roads across the marsh?

Clubbe pushed his way through the crowd to shake hands with the Rev.
Septimus Marvin, who seemed to emerge from a visionary world of his own
in order to perform that ceremony and to return thither on its
completion.

Then the majority of the onlookers straggled homeward, leaving a few
wives and sweethearts waiting by the steps, with patient eyes fixed on
the spidery figures in the rigging of "The Last Hope." Dormer Colville
and the Marquis de Gemosac were left alone, while the rector stood a few
yards away, glaring abstractedly at them through his gold-rimmed
spectacles as if they had been some strange flotsam cast up by the high
tide.

"I remember," said Colville to his companion, "that I have an
introduction to the pastor of the village, who, if I am not mistaken, is
even now contemplating opening a conversation. It was given to me by my
banker in Paris, who is a Suffolk man. You remember, Marquis, John
Turner, of the Rue Lafayette?"

"Yes--yes," answered the Marquis, absently. He was still watching the
retreating villagers, with eyes old and veiled by the trouble that they
had seen.

"I will take this opportunity of presenting myself," said Colville, who
was watching the little group from the rectory without appearing to do
so. He rose as he spoke and went toward the clergyman, who was probably
much younger than he looked. For he was ill-dressed and ill-shorn, with
straggling grey hair hanging to his collar. He had a musty look, such as
a book may have that is laid on a shelf in a deserted room and never
opened or read. Septimus Marvin, the world would say, had been laid upon
a shelf when he was inducted to the spiritual cure of Farlingford. But no
man is ever laid on a shelf by Fate. He climbs up there of his own will,
and lies down beneath the dust of forgetfulness because he lacks the
heart to arise and face the business of life.

Seeing that Dormer Colville was approaching him, he came forward with a
certain scholarly ease of manner as if he had once mixed with the best on
an intellectual equality.

Colville's manners were considered perfect, especially by those who were
unable to detect a fine line said to exist between ease and too much
ease. Mr. Marvin recollected John Turner well. Ten years earlier he had,
indeed, corresponded at some length with the Paris banker respecting a
valuable engraving. Was Mr. Colville interested in engravings? Colville
confessed to a deep and abiding pleasure in this branch of art, tempered,
he admitted with a laugh, by a colossal ignorance. He then proceeded to
give the lie to his own modesty by talking easily and well of mezzotints
and etchings.

"But," he said, interrupting himself with evident reluctance, "I am
forgetting my obligations. Let me present to you my companion, an old
friend, the Marquis de Gemosac."

The two gentlemen bowed, and Mr. Marvin, knowing no French, proceeded to
address the stranger in good British Latin, after the manner of the
courtly divines of his day. Which Latin, from its mode of pronunciation,
was entirely unintelligible to its hearer.

In return, the rector introduced the two strangers to his niece, Miriam
Liston.

"The mainstay of my quiet house," he added, with his vague and dreamy
smile.

"I have already heard of you," said Dormer Colville at once, with his
modest deference, "from my cousin, Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence."

He seemed, as sailors say, never to be at a loose end; but to go through
life with a facile readiness, having, as it were, his hands full of
threads among which to select, with a careless affability, one that must
draw him nearer to high and low, men and women, alike.

They talked together for some minutes, and, soon after the discovery that
Mariam Liston was as good a French scholar as himself, and therefore able
to converse with the Marquis de Gemosac, Colville regretted that it was
time for them to return to their simple evening meal at "The Black
Sailor."

"Well," said Colville to Monsieur de Gemosac, as they walked slowly
across the green toward the inn, embowered in its simple cottage-garden,
all ablaze now with hollyhocks and poppies--"well, after your glimpse at
this man, Marquis, are you desirous to see more of him?"

"My friend," answered the Frenchman, with a quick gesture, descriptive of
a sudden emotion not yet stilled, "he took my breath away. I can think of
nothing else. My poor brain is buzzing still, and I know not what answers
I made to that pretty English girl. Ah! You smile at my enthusiasm; you
do not know what it is to have a great hope dangling before the eyes all
one's life. And that face--that face!"

In which judgment the Marquis was no doubt right. For Dormer Colville was
too universal a man to be capable of concentrated zeal upon any one
object. He laughed at the accusation.

"After dinner," he answered, "I will tell you the little story as it was
told to me. We can sit on this seat, outside the inn, in the scent of the
flowers and smoke our cigarette."

To which proposal Monsieur de Gemosac assented readily enough. For he was
an old man, and to such the importance of small things, such as dinner or
a passing personal comfort, are apt to be paramount. Moreover, he was a
remnant of that class to which France owed her downfall among the
nations; a class represented faithfully enough by its King, Louis XVI,
who procrastinated even on the steps of the guillotine.

The wind went down with the sun, as had been foretold by River Andrew,
and the quiet of twilight lay on the level landscape like sleep when the
two travellers returned to the seat at the inn door. A distant curlew was
whistling cautiously to its benighted mate, but all other sounds were
still. The day was over.

"You remember," said Colville to his companion, "that six months after
the execution of the King, a report ran through Paris and all France that
the Dillons had succeeded in rescuing the Dauphin from the Temple."

"That was in July, 1793--just fifty-seven years ago--the news reached me
in Austria," answered the Marquis.

Colville glanced sideways at his companion, whose face was set with a
stubbornness almost worthy of the tenacious Bourbons themselves.

"The Queen was alive then," went on the Englishman, half diffidently, as
if prepared for amendment or correction. "She had nearly three months to
live. The separation from her children had only just been carried out.
She was not broken by it yet. She was in full possession of her health
and energy. She was one of the cleverest women of that time. She was
surrounded by men, some of whom were frankly half-witted, others who were
drunk with excess of a sudden power for which they had had no
preparation. Others, again, were timorous or cunning. All were ignorant,
and many had received no education at all. For there are many ignorant
people who have been highly educated, Marquis."

He gave a short laugh and lighted a cigarette. "Mind," he continued,
after a pause devoted to reflection which appeared to be neither deep nor
painful, for he smiled as he gazed across the hazy marshes, "mind, I am
no enthusiast, as you yourself have observed. I plead no cause. She was
not my Queen, Marquis, and France is not my country. I endeavour to look
at the matter with the eye of common-sense and wisdom. And I cannot
forget that Marie Antoinette was at bay: all her senses, all her wit
alert. She can only have thought of her children. Human nature would
dictate such thoughts. One cannot forget that she had devoted friends,
and that these friends possessed unlimited money. Do you think, Marquis,
that any one man of that rabble was above the reach--of money?"

And Mr. Dormer Colville's reflective smile, as he gazed at the distant
sea, would seem to indicate that, after a considerable experience of men
and women, he had reluctantly arrived at a certain conclusion respecting
them.

"No man born of woman, Marquis, is proof against bribery or flattery--or
both."

"One can believe anything that is bad of such dregs of human-kind, my
friend," said Monsieur de Gemosac, contemptuously.

"I speak to one," continued Colville, "who has given the attention of a
lifetime to the subject. If I am wrong, correct me. What I have been told
is that a man was found who was ready, in return for a certain sum paid
down, to substitute his own son for the little Dauphin--to allow his son
to take the chance of coming alive out of that predicament. One can
imagine that such a man could be found in France at that period."

Monsieur de Gemosac turned, and looked at his companion with a sort of
surprise.

"You speak as if in doubt, Monsieur Colville," he said, with a sudden
assumption of that grand manner with which his father had faced the
people on the Place de la Révolution--had taken a pinch of snuff in the
shadow of the guillotine one sunny July day. "You speak as if in doubt.
Such a man was found. I have spoken with him: I, who speak to you."




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 _rôles_ 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 Thérèse Charlotte, she who is now Duchess of Angoulême. 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'Angoulême--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, Königsberg,
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'Angoulême herself, you ask? I can see the
question in your face."

"Yet," 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
_régime_ she had accepted, than disturbed by the offer of another
_régime_, 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'Angoulême
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 Marguérite. 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 carnage
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 entrenchment 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
tomorrow 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 _tête-à-tête_.




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 _entrée_ 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."




Chapter VII


ON THE SCENT

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."




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 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 Orleanist _régime_. 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.




CHAPTER IX

A MISTAKE


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 that _canaille_ is 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. The _róles_ were 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.




CHAPTER X

IN THE ITALIAN HOUSE


The Abbé Touvent was not a courageous man, and the perspiration, induced
by the climb from the high-road up that which had once been the ramp to
the Château of Gemosac, ran cold when he had turned the key in the rusty
lock of the great gate. It was not a dark night, for the moon sailed
serenely behind fleecy clouds, but the shadows cast by her silvery light
might harbour any terror.

It is easy enough to be philosophic at home in a chair beside the lamp.
Under those circumstances, the Abbé had reflected that no one would rob
him, because he possessed nothing worth stealing. But now, out here in
the dark, he recalled a hundred instances of wanton murder duly recorded
in the newspaper which he shared with three parishioners in Gemosac.

He paused to wipe his brow with a blue cotton handkerchief before pushing
open the gate, and, being alone, was not too proud to peep through the
keyhole before laying his shoulder against the solid and weather-beaten
oak. He glanced nervously at the loopholes in the flanking towers and
upward at the machicolated battlement overhanging him, as if any
crumbling peep-hole might harbour gleaming eyes. He hurried through the
passage beneath the vaulted roof without daring to glance to either side,
where doorways and steps to the towers were rendered more fearsome by
heavy curtains of ivy.

The enceinte of the castle of Gemosac is three-sided, with four towers
jutting out at the corners, from which to throw a flanking fire upon any
who should raise a ladder against the great curtains, built of that
smooth, white stone which is quarried at Brantôme and on the banks of the
Dordogne. The fourth side of the enceinte stands on a solid rock, above
the little river that loses itself in the flatlands bordering the
Gironde, so that it can scarce be called a tributary of that wide water.
A moss-grown path round the walls will give a quick walker ten minutes'
exercise to make the round from one tower of the gateway to the other.

Within the enciente are the remains of the old castle, still solid and
upright; erected, it is recorded, by the English during their long
occupation of this country. A more modern château, built after the final
expulsion of the invader, adjoins the ancient structure, and in the
centre of the vast enclosure, raised above the walls, stands a square
house, in the Italian style, built in the time of Marie de Medici, and
never yet completed. There are, also, gardens and shaded walks and vast
stables, a chapel, two crypts, and many crumbling remains inside the
walls, that offered a passive resistance to the foe in olden time, and as
successfully hold their own to-day against the prying eye of a democratic
curiosity.

Above the stables, quite close to the gate, half a dozen rooms were in
the occupation of the Marquis de Gemosac; but it was not to these that
the Abbé Touvent directed his tremulous steps.

Instead, he went toward the square, isolated house, standing in the
middle of that which had once been the great court, and was now half
garden, half hayfield. The hay had been cut, and the scent of the new
stack, standing against the walls of the oldest château and under its
leaking roof, came warm and aromatic to mix with the breath of the
evening primrose and rosemary clustering in disorder on the ill-defined
borders. The grim walls, that had defended the Gemosacs against franker
enemies in other days, served now to hide from the eyes of the villagers
the fact--which must, however, have been known to them--that the Marquis
de Gemosac, in gloves, kept this garden himself, and had made the hay
with no other help than that of his old coachman and Marie, that capable,
brown-faced _bonne-à-tout-faire_, who is assuredly the best man in France
to-day.

In this clear, southern atmosphere the moon has twice the strength of
that to which we are accustomed in mistier lands, and the Abbè looked
about him with more confidence as he crossed the great court. There were
frogs in a rainwater tank constructed many years ago, when some
enterprising foe had been known to cut off the water-supply of a besieged
château, and their friendly croak brought a sense of company and comfort
to the Abbè's timid soul.

The door of the Italian house stood open, for the interior had never been
completed, and only one apartment, a lofty banqueting-hall, had ever been
furnished. Within the doorway, the Abbè fumbled in the pocket of his
soutane and rattled a box of matches. He carried a parcel in his hand,
which he now unfolded, and laid out on the lid of a mouldy chest half a
dozen candles. When he struck a match a flight of bats whirred out of the
doorway, and the Abbè's breath whistled through his teeth.

He lighted two candles, and carrying them, alight, in one hand--not
without dexterity, for candles played an important part in his life--he
went forward. The flickering light showed his face to be a fat one, kind
enough, gleaming now with perspiration and fear, but shiny at other times
with that Christian tolerance which makes men kind to their own failings.
It was very dark within the house, for all the shutters were closed.

The Abbé lighted a third candle and fixed it, with a drop of its own wax,
on the high mantel of the great banqueting-hall. There were four or five
candlesticks on side-tables, and a candelabra stood in the centre of a
long table, running the length of the room. In a few minutes the Abbé had
illuminated the apartment, which smelt of dust and the days of a dead
monarchy. Above his head, the bats were describing complicated figures
against a ceiling which had once been painted in the Italian style, to
represent a trellis roof, with roses and vines entwined. Half a dozen
portraits of men, in armour and wigs, looked down from the walls. One or
two of them were rotting from their frames, and dangled a despondent
corner out into the room.

There were chairs round the table, set as if for a phantom banquet amid
these mouldering environments, and their high carved backs threw
fantastic shadows on the wall.

While the Abbé was still employed with the candles, he heard a heavy step
and loud breathing in the hall without, where he had carefully left a
light.

"Why did you not wait for me on the hill, _malhonnête_?" asked a thick
voice, like the voice of a man, but the manner was the manner of a woman.
"I am sure you must have heard me. One hears me like a locomotive, now
that I have lost my slimness."

She came into the room as she spoke, unwinding a number of black, knitted
shawls, in which she was enveloped. There were so many of them, and of
such different shape and texture, that some confusion ensued. The Abbé
ran to her assistance.

"But, Madame," he cried, "how can you suspect me of such a crime? I came
early to make these preparations. And as for hearing you--would to Heaven
I had! For it needs courage to be a Royalist in these days--especially in
the dark, by one's self."

He seemed to know the shawls, for he disentangled them with skill and
laid them aside, one by one.

The Comtesse de Chantonnay breathed a little more freely, but no friendly
hand could disencumber her of the mountains of flesh, which must have
weighed down any heart less buoyant and courageous.

"Ah, bah!" she cried, gaily. "Who is afraid? What could they do to an old
woman? Ah! you hold up your hands. That is kind of you. But I am no
longer young, and there is my Albert--with those stupid whiskers. It is
unfilial to wear whiskers, and I have told him so. And you--who could
harm you--a priest? Besides, no one could be a priest, and not a
Royalist, Abbé!"

"I know it, Madame, and that is why I am one. Have we been seen, Madame
la Comtesse? The village was quiet, as you came through?"

"Quiet as my poor husband in his grave. Tell me? Abbé, now, honestly, am
I thinner? I have deprived myself of coffee these two days."

The Abbe walked gravely round her. It was quite an excursion.

"Who would have you different, Madame, to what you are?" he temporized.
"To be thin is so ungenerous. And Albert--where is he? You have not
surely come alone?"

"Heaven forbid!--and I a widow!" replied Madame de Chantonnay, arranging,
with a stout hand, the priceless lace on her dress. "Albert is coming. We
brought a lantern, although it is a moon. It is better. Besides, it is
always done by those who conspire. And Albert had his great cloak, and he
fell up a step in the courtyard and dropped the lantern, and lost it in
the long grass. I left him looking for it, in the dark. He was not
afraid, my brave Albert!"

"He has the dauntless heart of his mother," murmured the Abbé,
gracefully, as he ran round the table setting the chairs in order. He had
already offered the largest and strongest to the Comtesse, and it was
creaking under her now, as she moved to set her dress in order.

"Assuredly," she admitted, complacently. "Has not France produced a
Jeanne d'Arc and a Duchesse de Berri? It was not from his father, at all
events, that he inherited his courage. For he was a poltroon, that man.
Yes, my dear Abbé, let us be honest, and look at life as it is. He was a
poltroon, and I thought I loved him--for two or three days only, however.
And I was a child then. I was beautiful."

"Was?" echoed the Abbé, reproachfully.

"Silence, wicked one! And you a priest."

"Even an ecclesiastic, Madame, may have eyes," he said, darkly, as he
snuffed a candle and, subsequently, gave himself a mechanical thump on
the chest, in the region of the heart.

"Then they should wear blinkers, like a horse," said Madame, severely, as
if wearied by an admiration so universal that it palled.

At this moment, Albert de Chantonnay entered the room. He was enveloped
in a long black cloak, which he threw off his shoulders and cast over the
back of a chair, not without an obvious appreciation of its possibilities
of the picturesque. He looked round the room with a mild eye, which
refused to lend itself to mystery or a martial ruthlessness.

He was a young man with a very thin neck, and the whiskers, of which his
mother made complaint, were scarcely visible by the light of the Abbé's
candles.

"Good!" he said, in a thin tenor voice. "We are in time."

He came forward to the table, with long, nervous strides. He was not
exactly impressive, but his manner gave the assurance of a distinct
earnestness of purpose. The majority of us are unfortunately situated
toward the world, as regards personal appearance. Many could pass for
great if their physical proportions were less mean. There are thousands
of worthy and virtuous young men who never receive their due in social
life because they have red hair or stand four-feet-six high, or happen to
be the victim of an inefficient dentist. The world, it would seem, does
not want virtue or solid worth. It prefers appearance to either. Albert
de Chantonnay would, for instance, have carried twice the weight in
Royalist councils if his neck had been thicker.

He nodded to the Abbé.

"I received your message," he said, in the curt manner of the man whose
life is in his hand, or is understood, in French theatrical circles, to
be thus uncomfortably situated. "The letter?"

"It is here, Monsieur Albert," replied the Abbé, who was commonplace, and
could not see himself as he wished others to see him. There was only one
Abbé Touvent, for morning or afternoon, for church or fête, for the
château or the cottage. There were a dozen Albert de Chantonnays, fierce
or tender, gay or sad, a poet or a soldier--a light persifleur, who had
passed through the mill, and had emerged hard and shining, or a young man
of soul, capable of high ideals. To-night, he was the politician--the
conspirator--quick of eye, curt of speech.

He held out his hand for the letter.

"You are to read it, as Monsieur le Marquis instructs me, Monsieur
Albert," hazarded the Abbé, touching the breast pocket of his soutane,
where Monsieur de Gemosac's letter lay hidden, "to those assembled."

"But, surely, I am to read it to myself first," was the retort; "or else
how can I give it proper value?"




CHAPTER XI

A BEGINNING


There may be some who refuse to take seriously a person like Albert de
Chantonnay because, forsooth, he happened to possess a sense of the
picturesque. There are, as a matter of fact, thousands of sensible
persons in the British Isles who fail completely to understand the
average Frenchman. To the English comprehension it is, for instance,
surprising that in time of stress--when Paris was besieged by a German
army--a hundred _franc-tireur_ corps should spring into existence, who
gravely decked themselves in sombreros and red waist-cloths, and called
themselves the "Companions of Death," or some claptrap title of a similar
sound. Nevertheless, these "Companions of Death" fought at Orleans as few
have fought since man walked this earth, and died as bravely as any in a
government uniform. Even the stolid German foe forgot, at last, to laugh
at the sombrero worn in midwinter.

It is useless to dub a Frenchman unreal and theatrical when he gaily
carries his unreality and his perception of the dramatic to the lucarne
of the guillotine and meets imperturbably the most real thing on earth,
Death.

Albert de Chantonnay was a good Royalist--a better Royalist, as many were
in France at this time, than the King--and, perhaps, he carried his
loyalty to the point that is reached by the best form of flattery.

Let it be remembered that when, on the 3rd of May, 1814, Louis XVIII was
reinstated, not by his own influence or exertions, but by the allied
sovereigns who had overthrown Napoleon, he began at once to issue
declarations and decrees as of the nineteenth year of his reign, ignoring
the Revolution and Napoleon. Did this Bourbon really take himself
seriously? Did he really expect the world to overlook Napoleon, or did he
know as all the world knows to-day, that long after the Bourbons have
sunk into oblivion the name of Napoleon will continue to be a household
word?

If a situation is thus envisaged by a King, what may the wise expect from
a Royalist?

In the absence of the Marquis de Gemosac, Albert de Chantonnay was
considered to be the leader of the party in that quiet corner of
south-western France which lies north of Bordeaux and south of that great
dividing river, the Loire. He was, moreover, looked upon as representing
that younger blood of France, to which must be confided the hopes and
endeavours of the men, now passing away one by one, who had fought and
suffered for their kings.

It was confidently whispered throughout this pastoral country that August
Persons, living in exile in England and elsewhere, were in familiar and
confidential correspondence with the Marquis de Gemosac, and, in a minor
degree, with Albert de Chantonnay. For kings, and especially deposed
kings, may not be choosers, but must take the instrument that comes to
hand. A constitutional monarch is, by the way, better placed in this
respect, for it is his people who push the instrument into his grasp, and
in the long run the people nearly always read a man aright despite the
efforts of a cheap press to lead them astray.

"If it were not written in the Marquis's own writing I could not have
believed it," said Albert de Chantonnay, speaking aloud his own thoughts.
He turned the letter this way and that, examining first the back of it
and then the front.

"It has not been through the post." he said to the Abbé, who stood
respectfully watching his face, which, indeed, inspired little
confidence, for the chin receded in the wrong way--not like the chin of a
shark, which indicates, not foolishness, but greed of gain--and the eyes
were large and pale like those of a sheep.

"Oh, Heaven forbid!" cried the Abbé. "Such a letter as that! Where should
we all be if it were read by the government? And all know that letters
passing through the post to the address of such as Monsieur Albert are
read in passing--by the Prince President himself, as likely as not."

Albert gave a short, derisive laugh, and shrugged his shoulders, which
made his admiring mother throw back her head with a gesture, inviting the
Abbé to contemplate, with satisfaction, the mother of so brave a man.

"_Voilà_," she said, "but tell us, my son, what is in the letter?"

"Not yet," was the reply. "It is to be read to all when they are
assembled. In the mean time--"

He did not finish the sentence in words, but by gesture conveyed that the
missive, now folded and placed in his breast-pocket, was only to be
obtained bespattered with his life's blood. And the Abbé wiped his clammy
brow with some satisfaction that it should be thus removed from his own
timorous custody.

Albert de Chantonnay was looking expectantly at the door, for he had
heard footsteps, and now he bowed gravely to a very old gentleman, a
notary of the town, who entered the room with a deep obeisance to the
Comtesse. Close on the notary's heels came others. Some were in riding
costume, and came from a distance.

One sprightly lady wore evening dress, only partially concealed by a
cloak. She hurried in with a nod for Albert de Chantonnay, and a kiss for
the Comtesse. Her presence had the immediate effect of imparting an air
of practical common-sense energy to the assembly, which it had hitherto
lacked. There was nothing of the old _régime_ in this lady, who seemed to
over-ride etiquette, and cheerfully ignore the dramatic side of the
proceedings.

"Is it not wonderful?" she whispered aloud, after the manner of any
modern lady at one of those public meetings in which they take so large a
part with so small a result in these later days. "Is it not wonderful?"
And her French, though pure enough, was full and round--the French of an
English tongue. "I have had a long letter from Dormer telling me all
about it. Oh--" And she broke off, silenced by the dark frown of Albert
de Chantonnay, to which her attention had been forcibly directed by his
mother. "I have been dining with Madame de Rathe," she went on,
irrepressibly, changing the subject in obedience to Albert de
Chantonnay's frown. "The Vicomtesse bids me make her excuses. She feared
an indigestion, so will be absent to-night."

"Ah!" returned the Comtesse de Chantonnay. "It is not that. I happen to
know that the Vicomtesse de Rathe has the digestion of a schoolboy. It is
because she has no confidence in Albert. But we shall see--we shall see.
It is not for the nobility of Louis Philippe to--to have a poor
digestion."

And the Comtesse de Chantonnay made a gesture and a meaning grimace which
would have been alarming enough had her hand and face been less dimpled
with good nature.

There were now assembled about a dozen persons, and the Abbé was kept in
countenance by two others of his cloth. There were several ladies; one of
whom was young and plain and seemed to watch Albert de Chantonnay with a
timid awe. Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence, seated next to the Comtesse de
Chantonnay, was the only lady who made any attempt at gay apparel, and
thus stood rather conspicuous among her companions clad in sober and
somewhat rusty black. All over the west of France such meetings of the
penniless Royalists were being held at this time, not, it has been
averred, without the knowledge of the Prince President, who has been
credited with the courage to treat the matter with contempt. About no
monarch, living or dead, however, have so many lies been written, by
friend or foe, with good or ill intent, as about him, who subsequently
carried out the astounding feat of climbing to the throne of France as
Napoleon III. And it seems certain that he has been given credit for
knowing much of which he must have been ignorant to an extent hardly
credible, even now, in face of subsequent events.

The Comtesse de Chantonnay was still tossing her head, at intervals,
at the recollection of the Vicomtesse de Rathe's indigestion. This was
only typical of the feelings that divided every camp in France at this
time--at any time, indeed, since the days of Charlemagne--for the French
must always quarrel among themselves until they are actually on the brink
of national catastrophe. And even when they are fallen into that pit they
will quarrel at the bottom, and bespatter each other with the mud that is
there.

"Are we all here?" asked Albert de Chantonnay, standing in an effective
attitude at the end of the table, with his hand on the back of his chair.
He counted the number of his fellow-conspirators, and then sat down,
drawing forward a candelabra.

"You have been summoned in haste," he said, "by the request of the
Marquis de Gemosac to listen to the perusal of a letter of importance. It
may be of the utmost importance--to us--to France--to all the world."

He drew the letter from his pocket and opened it amid a breathless
silence. His listeners noted the care with which he attended to gesture
and demeanour, and accounted it to him for righteousness; for they were
French. An English audience would have thought him insincere, and they
would have been wrong.

"The letter is dated from a place called Farlingford, in England. I have
never heard of it. It is nowhere near to Twickenham or Clarement, nor is
it in Buckinghamshire. The rest of England--no one knows." Albert paused
and held up one hand for silence.

"At last," he read--"at last, my friends, after a lifetime of fruitless
search, it seems that I have found--through the good offices of Dormer
Colville--not the man we have sought, but his son. We have long suspected
that Louis XVII must be dead. Madame herself, in her exile at Frohsdorff,
has admitted to her intimates that she no longer hoped. But here in the
full vigour of youth--a sailor, strong and healthy, living a simple life
on shore as at sea--I have found a man whose face, whose form, and manner
would clearly show to the most incredulous that he could be no other than
the son of Louis XVII. A hundred tricks of manner and gesture he has
inherited from the father he scarce remembers, from the grandfather who
perished on the guillotine many years before he himself was born. No
small proof of the man's sincerity is the fact that only now, after long
persuasion, has he consented to place himself in our hands. I thought of
hurrying at once to Frohsdorff to present to the aged Duchess a youth
whom she cannot fail to recognize as her nephew. But better counsels have
prevailed. Dormer Colville, to whom we owe so much, has placed us in his
farther debt for a piece of sage advice. 'Wait,' he advises, 'until the
young man has learned what is expected of him, until he has made the
personal acquaintance of his supporters. Reserve until the end the
presentation to the Duchesse d'Angouleme, which must only be made when
all the Royalists in France are ready to act with a unanimity which will
be absolute, and an energy which must prove irresistible.'

"There are more material proofs than a face so strongly resembling that
of Louis XVI and Monsieur d'Artois, in their early manhood, as to take
the breath away; than a vivacity inherited from his grandmother, together
with an independence of spirit and impatience of restraint; than the
slight graceful form, blue eyes, and fair skin of the little prisoner of
the Temple. There are dates which go to prove that this boy's father
was rescued from a sinking fishing-boat, near Dieppe, a few days after
the little Dauphin was known to have escaped from the Temple, and to
have been hurried to the north coast disguised as a girl. There is
evidence, which Monsieur Colville is now patiently gathering from these
slow-speaking people, that the woman who was rescued with this child was
not his mother. And there are a hundred details known to the villagers
here which go to prove what we have always suspected to be the case,
namely, that Louis XVII was rescued from the Temple by the daring and
ingenuity of a devoted few who so jealously guarded their secret that
they frustrated their own object; for they one and all must have perished
on the guillotine, or at the hands of some other assassin, without
divulging their knowledge, and in the confusion and horror of those days
the little Dauphin was lost to sight.

"There is a trinket--a locket--containing a miniature, which I am assured
is a portrait of Marie Antoinette. This locket is in the possession of
Dormer Colville, who suggests that we should refrain from using violence
to open it until this can be done in France in the presence of suitable
witnesses. A fall or some mishap has so crushed the locket that it can
only be opened by a jeweller provided with suitable instruments. It has
remained closed for nearly a quarter of a century, but a reliable witness
in whose possession it has been since he, who was undoubtedly Louis XVII,
died in his arms, remembers the portrait, and has no doubt of its
authenticity. I have told you enough to make it clear to you that my
search is at last ended. What we require now is money to enable us to
bring this King of France to his own; to bring him, in the first place,
to my humble château of Gemosac, where he can lie hidden until all
arrangements are made. I leave it to you, my dear Albert, to collect this
preliminary sum."

De Chantonnay folded the letter and looked at the faces surrounding the
dimly lighted table.

Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence, who must have known the contents of the letter,
and, therefore, came provided, leaned across the table with a discreet
clink of jewellery and laid before Albert de Chantonnay a note for a
thousand francs.

"I am only an Englishwoman," she said, simply, "but I can help."




CHAPTER XII

THE SECRET OF GEMOSAC


There is no sentiment so artificial as international hatred. In olden
days it owed its existence to churchmen, and now an irresponsible press
foments that dormant antagonism. Wherever French and English individuals
are thrown together by a common endeavour, both are surprised at the
mutual esteem which soon develops into friendship. But as nations we are
no nearer than we were in the great days of Napoleon.

Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence was only one-quarter French and three-quarters
English. Her grandmother had been a St. Pierre; but it was not from that
lady that she inherited a certain open-handedness which took her French
friends by surprise.

"It is not that she has the cause at heart," commented Madame de
Chantonnay, as she walked laboriously on Albert's arm down the ramp of
the Château de Gemosac at the termination of the meeting. "It is not for
that that she throws her note of a thousand francs upon the table and
promises more when things are in train. It is because she can refuse
nothing to Dormer Colville. _Allez_, my son! I have a woman's heart! I
know!"

Albert contented himself with a sardonic laugh. He was not in the humour
to talk of women's hearts; for Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence's action had
struck a sudden note of British realism into the harmony of his political
fancies. He had talked so much, had listened to so much talk from others,
that the dream of a restored monarchy had at last been raised to those
far realms of the barely possible in which the Gallic fancy wanders in
moments of facile digestion.

It was sufficient for the emergency that the others present at the
meeting could explain that one does not carry money in one's pocket in a
country lane at night, But in their hearts all were conscious of a slight
feeling of resentment toward Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence; of a vague sense
of disappointment, such as a dreamer may experience on being roughly
awakened.

The three priests folded their hands with complacency. Poverty, their
most cherished possession, spoke for itself in their case. The notary
blinked and fumbled at his lips with yellow fingers in hasty thought. He
was a Royalist notary because there existed in the country of the Deux
Sevres a Royalist _clientèle_. In France, even a washerwoman must hold
political views and stand or fall by them. It was astounding how poor
every one felt at that moment, and it rested, as usual, with a woman's
intuition to grasp the only rope within reach. "The vintage," this lady
murmured. The vintage promised to be a bad one. Nothing, assuredly, could
be undertaken, and no promise made, until the vintage was over.

So the meeting broke up without romance, and the conspirators dispersed
to their homes, carrying in their minds that mutual distrust which is
ever awakened in human hearts by the chink of gold, while the dormant
national readiness to detect betrayal by England was suddenly wide awake.

Nevertheless, Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence had supplied the one ingredient
necessary to leaven the talk of these dreamers into action. Even the
notary found himself compelled to contribute when Albert de Chantonnay
asked him outright for a subscription. And the priests, ably led by the
Abbé Touvent, acted after the manner of the sons of Levi since olden
times. They did not give themselves, but they told others to give, which
is far better.

In due course the money was sent to England. It was the plain truth that
the Marquis de Gemosac had not sufficient in his pocket to equip Loo
Barebone with the clothes necessary to a seemly appearance in France; or,
indeed, to cover the expense of the journey thither. Dormer Colville
never had money to spare. "Heaven shaped me for a rich man," he would
say, lightly, whenever the momentous subject was broached, "but forgot to
fill my pockets."

It was almost the time of the vintage, and the country roads were dotted
with the shambling figures of those knights of industry who seem to
spring from the hedgerows at harvest-time in any country in the world,
when the Abbé Touvent sought out Marie in her cottage at the gates of the
château.

"_A la cave_" answered the lady's voice. "In the cellar--do you not know
that it is Monday and I wash?"

The Abbé did not repeat his summons on the kitchen table with the handle
of his stick, but drew forward a chair.

"I know it is very hot, and that I am tired," he shouted toward the
cellar door, which stood open, giving egress to a warm smell of soap.

"Precisely--and does Monsieur l'Abbé want me to come up as I am?"

The suggestion was darkly threatening, and the Abbé replied that Marie
must take her time, since it was washing-day.

The cottage was built on sloping ground at the gate of the château,
probably of the stones used for some earlier fortification. That which
Marie called the cellar was but half underground, and had an exit to the
garden which grew to the edge of the cliff. It was not long before she
appeared at the head of the stone steps, a square-built woman with a face
that had been sunburnt long ago by work in the vineyards, and eyes
looking straight at the world from beneath a square and wrinkled
forehead.

"Monsieur l'Abbé," she said, shortly--a salutation, and a comment in one;
for it conveyed the fact that she saw it was he and perceived that he was
in his usual health. "It is news from Monsieur, I suppose," she added,
slowly, turning down her sleeves.

"Yes, the Marquis writes that he is on his way to Gemosac and wishes you
to prepare the château for his return."

The Abbé waved his hand toward the castle gates with an air suggestive of
retainers and lackeys, of busy stables and a hundred windows lighted
after dark. His round eyes did not meet the direct glance fixed on his
face, but wandered from one object to another in the room, finally
lighting on the great key of the château gate, which hung on a nail
behind the door.

"Then Monsieur le Marquis is coming into residence," said Marie, gravely.

And by way of reply the Abbé waved his hand a second time toward the
castle walls.

"And the worst of it is," he added, timidly, to this silent admission,
"that he brings a guest."

He moistened his fat lips and sat smiling in a foolish way at the open
door; for he was afraid of all women, and most afraid of Marie.

"Ah!" she retorted, shortly. "To sleep in the oubliette, one may suppose.
For there is no other bed in the château, as you quite well know,
Monsieur l'Abbé. It is another of your kings no doubt. Oh! you need not
hold up your hands--when Monsieur Albert reads aloud that letter from
Monsieur le Marquis, in England, without so much as closing the door of
the banquet hall! It is as well that it was no other than I who stood on
the stairs outside and heard all."

"But it is wrong to listen behind doors," protested the Abbé.

"Ah, bah!" replied this unregenerate sheep of his flock. "But do not
alarm yourself, Monsieur l'Abbé, I can keep a quiet tongue. And a
political secret--what is it? It is an amusement for the rich--your
politics--but a vice for the poor. Come, let us go to the château, while
there is still day, and you can see for yourself whether we are ready for
a guest."

While she spoke she hastily completed a toilet, which, despite the Abbé's
caution, had the appearance of incompleteness, and taking the great key
from behind the door, led the way out into the glare of the setting sun.
She unlocked the great gate and threw her weight against it with quick,
firm movements like the movements of a man. Indeed, she was a better man
than her companion; of a stronger common sense; with lither limbs and a
stouter heart; the best man that France has latterly produced, and, so
far as the student of racial degeneration may foretell, will ever produce
again--her middle-class woman.

Built close against the flanking tower on the left hand of the courtyard
was a low, square house of two stories only. The whole ground floor was
stabling, room and to spare for half a hundred horses, and filled
frequently enough, no doubt, in the great days of the Great Henry. On the
first floor, to which three or four staircases gave access, there were
plenty of apartments; indeed, suites of them. But nearly all stood empty,
and the row of windows looked blank and curtainless across the crumbling
garden to the Italian house.

It was one of the many tragedies of that smiling, sunny land where only
man, it seems, is vile; for nature has enclosed within its frontier-lines
all the varied wealth and beauty of her treasures.

Marie led the way up the first staircase, which was straight and narrow.
The carpet, carefully rolled and laid aside on the landing, was
threadbare and colourless. The muslin curtains, folded back and pinned
together, were darned and yellow with frequent washing and the rust of
ancient damp. She opened the door of the first room at the head of the
stairs. It had once been the apartment of some servitor; now it contained
furniture of the gorgeous days of Louis XIV, with all the colour gone
from its tapestry, all the woodwork grey and worm-eaten.

"Not that one," said Marie, as the Abbé struggled with the lever that
fastened the window. "That one has not been opened for many years. See!
the glass rattles in the frame. It is the other that opens."

Without comment the Abbé opened the other window and threw back the
shutters, from which all the paint had peeled away, and let in the
scented air. Mignonette close at hand--which had bloomed and died and
cast its seed amid the old walls and falling stones since Marie
Antoinette had taught the women of France to take an interest in their
gardens; and from the great plains beyond--flat and fat--carefully laid
there by the Garonne to give the world its finest wines, rose up the
subtle scent of vines in bloom.

"The drawing-room," said Marie, and making a mock-curtsey toward the
door, which stood open to the dim stairs, she made a grand gesture with
her hand, still red and wrinkled from the wash-tub. "Will the King of
France be pleased to enter and seat himself? There are three chairs, but
one of them is broken, so his Majesty's suite must stand."

With a strident laugh she passed on to the next room through folding
doors.

"The principal room," she announced, with that hard irony in her voice,
which had, no doubt, penetrated thither from the soul of a mother who
had played no small part in the Revolution. "The guest-chamber, one may
say, provided that Monsieur le Marquis will sleep on the floor in the
drawing-room, or in the straw down below in the stable."

The Abbé threw open the shutter of this room also and stood meekly eyeing
Marie with a tolerant smile. The room was almost bare of furniture. A bed
such as peasants sleep on; a few chairs; a dressing-table tottering
against the window-breast, and modestly screened in one corner, the
diminutive washing-stand still used in southern France. For Gemosac had
been sacked and the furniture built up into a bonfire when Marie was a
little child and the Abbé Touvent a fat-faced timorous boy at the
Seminary of Saintes.

"Beyond is Mademoiselle's room," concluded Marie, curtly. She looked
round her and shrugged her shoulders with a grim laugh which made the
Abbé shrink. They looked at each other in silence, the two participants
in the secret of Gemosac; for Marie's husband, the third who had access
to the chateau, did not count. He was a shambling, silent man, now
working in the vineyard beneath the walls. He always did what his wife
told him, without comment or enthusiasm, knowing well that he would be
blamed for doing it badly.

The Abbé had visited the rooms once before, during a brief passage of the
Marquis, soon after his wife's death in Paris. But, as a rule, only Marie
and Jean had access to the apartment. He looked round with an eye always
ready with the tear of sympathy; for he was a soft-hearted man. Then he
looked at Marie again, shamefacedly. But she, divining his thoughts,
shrugged her shoulders.

"Ah, bah!" she said, "one must take the world as it is. And Monsieur
le Marquis is only a man. One sees that, when he announces his return
on washing-day, and brings a guest. You must write to him, that is all,
and tell him that with time I can arrange, but not in a hurry like
this. Where is the furniture to come from? A chair or two from the
banquet-hall; I can lend a bed which Jean can carry in after dark so that
no one knows; you have the jug and basin you bought when the Bishop came,
that you must lend--" She broke off and ran to the window. "Good," she
cried, in a despairing voice, "I hear a carriage coming up the hill. Run,
Monsieur l'Abbé--run to the gate and bolt it. Guest or no guest, they
cannot see the rooms like this. Here, let me past."

She pushed him unceremoniously aside at the head of the stairs and ran
past him. Long concealment of the deadly poverty within the walls had
taught her to close the gates behind her whenever she entered, but now
for greater security, or to gain time, she swung the great oaken beam
round on its pivot across the doors on the inside. Then turning round on
her heels she watched the bell that hung above her head. The Abbé, who
had followed her as quickly as he could, was naively looking for a
peep-hole between the timbers of the huge doors.

A minute later the bell swung slowly, and gave a single clang which
echoed beneath the vaulted roof, and in the hollow of the empty towers on
either side.

"Marie, Marie!" cried a gay girlish voice from without. "Open at once. It
is I."

"There," said Marie, in a whisper. "It is Mademoiselle, who has returned
from the good Sisters. And the story that you told of the fever at
Saintes is true."




CHAPTER XIII

WITHIN THE GATES


The great bell hanging inside the gates of Gemosac was silent for two
days after the return of Juliette de Gemosac from her fever-stricken
convent school, at Saintes.

But on the third day, soon after nightfall, it rang once more, breaking
suddenly in on the silence of the shadowy courts and gardens, bidding the
frogs in the tank be still with a soft, clear voice, only compassed by
the artificers who worked in days when silver was little accounted of in
the forging of a bell.

It was soon after eight o'clock, and darkness had not long covered the
land and sent the workers home. There was no moon. Indeed, the summons to
the gate, coming so soon after nightfall, seemed to suggest the arrival
of a traveller, who had not deemed it expedient to pass through the
winding streets of Gemosac by daylight.

The castle lies on a height, sufficiently removed from the little town to
temper the stir of its streets to a pleasant and unobtrusive evidence of
neighbourhood. Had the traveller come in a carriage, the sound of its
wheels would certainly have been heard; and nearer at hand, the tramp of
horses on the hollow of the old drawbridge, not raised these hundred
years, must have heralded the summons of the bell. But none of these
sounds had warned Juliette de Gemosac, who sat alone in the little white
room upstairs, nor Marie and her husband, dumb and worn by the day's
toil, who awaited bedtime on a stone seat by the stable door.

Juliette, standing at the open window, heard Jean stir himself, and
shuffle, in his slippers, toward the gate.

"It is some one who comes on foot," she heard Marie say. "Some
beggar--the roads are full of them. See that he gets no farther than the
gate."

She heard Jean draw back the bolts and answer gruffly, in a few words,
through the interstice of a grudging door, what seemed to be inquiries
made in a voice that was not the voice of a peasant. Marie rose and went
to the gate. In a few minutes they returned, and Juliette drew back from
the window, for they were accompanied by the new-comer, whose boots made
a sharper, clearer sound on the cobble-stones.

"Yes," Juliette heard him explain, "I am an Englishman, but I come from
Monsieur de Gemosac, for all that. And since Mademoiselle is here, I must
see her. It was by chance that I heard, on the road, that there is fever
at Saintes, and that she had returned home. I was on my way to Saintes to
see her and give her my news of her father."

"But what news?" asked Marie, and the answer was lost as the speakers
passed into the doorway, the new-comer evidently leading the way, the
peasant and his wife following without protest, and with that instinctive
obedience to unconscious command which will survive all the iconoclasm of
a hundred revolutions.

There followed a tramping on the stairs and a half-suppressed laugh as
the new-comer stumbled upward. Marie opened the door slowly.

"It is a gentleman," she announced, "who does not give his name."

Juliette de Gemosac was standing at the far side of the table, with the
lamp throwing its full light upon her. She was dressed in white, with a
blue ribbon at her waist and wrists. Another ribbon of the same colour
tied back her hair, which was of a bright brown, with curls that caught
the light in a score of tendrils above her ears. No finished coquette
could have planned a prettier surprise than that which awaited Loo
Barebone, as he made Marie stand aside, and came, hat in hand, into the
room.

He paused for an instant, breathless, before Juliette, who stood, with a
little smile of composed surprise parting her lips. This child, fresh
from the quiet of a convent-school, was in no wise taken aback nor at a
loss how to act. She did not speak, but stood with head erect, not
ungracious, looking at him with clear brown eyes, awaiting his
explanation. And Loo Barebone, all untaught, who had never spoken to a
French lady in his life, came forward with an assurance and a readiness
which must have lain dormant in his blood, awaiting the magic of this
moment.

"Since my name would convey nothing to Mademoiselle," he said, with a bow
which he had assuredly not learnt in Farlingford, "it was useless to
mention it. But it is at the disposal of Mademoiselle, nevertheless. It
is an English name--Barebone. I am the Englishman who has been fortunate
enough to engage the interest of your father, who journeyed to England to
find me--and found me."

He broke off with a laugh, spreading out his arms to show himself, as it
were, and ask indulgence.

"I have a heritage, it appears, in France," he went on, "but know nothing
of it, yet. For the weather has been bad and our voyage a stormy one. I
was to have been told during the journey, but we had no time for that.
And I know no more than you, mademoiselle."

Juliette had changed colour, and her cheeks, which were usually of a most
delicate pink, were suddenly quite white. She did not touch upon the
knowledge to which he referred, but went past it to its object.

"You do not speak like an Englishman," she said. "For I know one or two.
One came to the school at Saintes. He was a famous English prelate, and
he had the manner--well, of a tree. And when he spoke, it was what one
would expect of a tree, if it suddenly had speech. But you--you are not
like that."

Loo Barebone laughed with an easy gaiety, which seemed infectious, though
Marie did not join in it, but stood scowling in the doorway.

"Yes," he said, "you have described them exactly. I know a hundred who
are like great trees. Many are so, but they are kind and still like
trees--the English, when you know them, mademoiselle."

"They?" she said, with her prettily arched eyebrows raised high.

"We, I mean," he answered, quickly, taking her meaning in a flash. "I
almost forgot that I was an Englishman. It is my heritage, perhaps, that
makes me forget--or yourself. It is so easy and natural to consider one's
self a Frenchman--and so pleasant."

Marie shuffled with her feet and made a movement of impatience, as if to
remind them that they were still far from the business in hand and were
merely talking of themselves, which is the beginning of all things--or
may be the beginning of the inevitable end.

"But I forgot," said Barebone, at once. "And it is getting late. Your
father has had a slight misfortune. He has sprained his ankle. He is on
board my ship, the ship of which I am--I have been--an officer, lying at
anchor in the river near here, off the village of Mortagne. I came from
Mortagne at your father's request, with certain messages, for yourself,
mademoiselle, and for Marie--if Madame is Marie."

"Yes," replied the grim voice in the doorway. "Madame is Marie."

Loo had turned toward her. It seemed his happy fate to be able to disarm
antagonism at the first pass. He looked at Marie and smiled; and slowly,
unwillingly, her grim face relaxed.

"Well," he said, "you are not to expect Monsieur le Marquis to-night, nor
yet, for some time to come. For he will go on to Bordeaux, where he can
obtain skilled treatment for his injured ankle, and remain there until he
can put his foot to the ground. He is comfortable enough on board the
ship, which will proceed up the river to-morrow morning to Bordeaux.
Monsieur le Marquis also told me to set your mind at rest on another
point. He was to have brought with him a guest--"

Loo paused and bowed to Marie, with a gay grace.

"A humble one. But I am not to come to Gemosac just now. I am going,
instead, with Monsieur Dormer Colville, to stay at Royan with Mrs. St.
Pierre Lawrence. It is, I hope, a pleasure deferred. I cannot, it
appears, show myself in Bordeaux at present, and I quit the ship
to-night. It is some question of myself and my heritage in France, which
I do not understand."

"Is that so?" said Marie. "One can hardly believe it."

"What do you mean?"

"Oh, nothing," replied Marie, looking at his face with a close scrutiny,
as if it were familiar to her.

"And that is all that I had to tell you, Madame Marie," concluded
Barebone.

And, strangely enough, Marie smiled at him as he turned away, not
unkindly.

"To you, mademoiselle," he went on, turning again to Juliette, whose hand
was at her hair, for she had been taken by surprise, "my message is
simpler. Monsieur, your father, will be glad to have your society at
Bordeaux, while he stays there, if that is true which the Gironde pilot
told him--of fever at Saintes, and the hurried dispersal of the schools."

"It is true enough, monsieur," answered Juliette, in her low-pitched
voice of the south, and with a light of anticipation in her eye; for it
was dull enough at Gemosac, all alone in this empty château. "But how am
I to reach Bordeaux?"

"Your father did not specify the route or method. He seemed to leave that
to you, mademoiselle. He seemed to have an entire faith in your judgment,
and that is why I was so surprised when I saw you. I thought--well, I
figured to myself that you were older, you understand."

He broke off with a laugh and a deprecatory gesture of the hand, as
if he had more in his mind but did not want to put it into words. His
meaning was clear enough in his eyes, but Juliette was fresh from a
convent-school, where they seek earnestly to teach a woman not to be a
woman.

"One may be young, and still have understanding, monsieur," she said,
with the composed little smile on her demure lips, which must only have
been the composure of complete innocence: almost a monopoly of children,
though some women move through life without losing it.

"Yes," answered Loo, looking into her eyes. "So it appears. So, how will
you go to Bordeaux? How does one go from Gemosac to Bordeaux?"

"By carriage to Mortagne, where a boat is always to be obtained. It is a
short journey, if the tide is favourable," broke in Marie, who was
practical before she was polite.

"Then," said Loo, as quick as thought, "drive back with me now to
Mortagne. I have left my horse in the town, my boat at the pier at
Mortagne. It is an hour's drive. In an hour and a half you will be on
board 'The Last Hope,' at anchor in the river. There is accommodation on
board for both you and Madame; for I, alas! Leave the ship to-night with
Monsieur Colville, and thus vacate two cabins."

Juliette reflected for a moment, but she did not consult, even by a
glance, Marie; who, in truth, appeared to expect no such confidences, but
awaited the decision with a grim and grudging servitude which was as
deeply pressed in upon her soul as was the habit of command in the soul
of a de Gemosac.

"Yes," said Juliette, at length, "that will be best. It is, of course,
important that my father should reach Bordeaux as soon as possible."

"He will be there at midday to-morrow, if you will come with me now,"
answered Loo, and his gay eyes said "Come!" as clearly as his lips,
though Juliette could not, of course, be expected to read such signals.

The affair was soon settled, and Jean ordered to put the horse into the
high, old-fashioned carriage still in use at the château. For Juliette
de Gemosac seemed to be an illustration of the fact, known to many
much-tried parents, that one is never too young to know one's mind.

"There is a thunder-storm coming from the sea," was Jean's only comment.

There was some delay in starting; for Marie had to change her own clothes
as well as pack her young mistress's simple trunks. But the time did not
hang heavily on the hands of the two waiting in the little drawing-room,
and Marie turned an uneasy glance toward the open door more than once at
the sound of their laughter.

Barebone was riding a horse hired in the village of Mortagne, and quitted
the château first, on foot, saying that the carriage must necessarily
travel quicker than he, as his horse was tired. The night was dark, and
darkest to the west, where lightning danced in and out among heavy clouds
over the sea.

As in all lands that have been torn hither and thither by long wars, the
peasants of Guienne learnt, long ago, the wisdom of dwelling together in
closely built villages, making a long journey to their fields or
vineyards every day. In times past, Gemosac had been a walled town,
dominated, as usual, by the almost impregnable castle.

Barebone rode on, alone, through the deserted vineyards, of which the
scent, like that of a vinery in colder lands, was heavy and damp. The
road runs straight, from point to point, and there was no chance of
missing the way or losing his companions. He was more concerned with
watching the clouds, which were rising in dark towers against the western
sky. He had noted that others were watching them, also, standing at their
doors in every street. It was the period of thunder and hailstorms--the
deadly foe of the vine.

At length Barebone pulled up and waited; for he could hear the sound of
wheels behind him, and noted that it was not increasing in loudness.

"Can you not go faster?" he shouted to Jean, when, at length, the
carriage approached.

Jean made no answer, but lashed his horse and pointed upward to the sky
with his whip. Barebone rode in front to encourage the slower horse. At
the village of Mortagne he signed to Jean to wait before the inn until he
had taken his horse to the stable and paid for its hire. Then he
clambered to the box beside him and they rattled down the long street and
out into the open road that led across the marshes to the port--a few
wooden houses and a jetty, running out from the shallows to the channel.

When they reached the jetty, going slowly at the last through the heavy
dust, the air was still and breathless. The rounded clouds still towered
above them, making the river black with their deep shadows. A few lights
twinkled across the waters. They were the lightships marking the middle
bank of the Gironde, which is many miles wide at this spot and rendered
dangerous by innumerable sand-banks.

"In five minutes it will be upon us," said Jean. "You had better turn
back."

"Oh, no," was the reply, with a reassuring laugh. "In the country where I
come from, they do not turn back."




CHAPTER XIV

THE LIFTED VEIL


"Where is the boatman?" asked Marie, as she followed Juliette and
Barebone along the deserted jetty. A light burnt dimly at the end of it
and one or two boats must have been moored near at hand; for the water
could be heard lapping under their bows, a secretive, whispering sound
full of mystery.

"I am the boatman," replied Loo, over his shoulder. "Are you afraid?"

"What is the good of being afraid?" asked this woman of the world,
stopping at the head of the steps and peering down into the darkness into
which he had descended. "What is the good of being afraid when one is old
and married? I was afraid enough when I was a girl, and pretty and
coquette like Mademoiselle, here. I was afraid enough then, and it was
worth my while--_allez_!"

Barebone made no answer to this dark suggestion of a sprightly past. The
present darkness and the coming storm commanded his full attention. In
the breathless silence, Juliette and Marie--and behind them, Jean,
panting beneath the luggage balanced on his shoulder--could hear the wet
rope slipping through his fingers and, presently, the bump of the heavy
boat against the timber of the steps.

This was followed by the gurgle of a rope through a well-greased sheave
and the square lug, which had been the joy of little Sep Marvin at
Farlingford, crept up to the truck of the stubby mast.

"There is no wind for that," remarked Marie, pessimistically.

"There will be to spare in a few minutes," answered Barebone, and the
monosyllabic Jean gave an acquiescent grunt.

"Luggage first," said Barebone, lapsing into the curtness of the sea.
"Come along. Let us make haste."

They stumbled on board as best they could, and were guided to a safe
place amidships by Loo, who had thrown a spare sail on the bottom of the
boat.

"As low as you can," he said. "Crouch down. Cover yourselves with this.
Right over your heads."

"But why?" grumbled Marie.

"Listen," was all the answer he gave her. And as he spoke, the storm
rushed upon them like a train, with the roar and whirl of a locomotive.

Loo jumped aft to the tiller. In the rush of the hail, they heard him
give a sharp order to Jean, who must have had some knowledge of the sea,
for he obeyed at once, and the boat, set free, lurched forward with a
flap of her sail, which was like the report of a cannon. For a moment,
all seemed confusion and flapping chaos, then came a sense of tenseness,
and the boat heeled over with a swish, which added a hundred-weight of
solid water to the beating of the hail on the spare sail, beneath which
the women crouched.

"What? Did you speak?" shouted Loo, putting his face close to the canvas.

"It is only Marie calling on the saints," was the answer, in Juliette's
laughing voice.

In a few minutes it was over; and, even at the back of the winds, could
be heard the retreat of the hail as it crashed onward toward the valleys
of which every slope is a named vineyard, to beat down in a few wild
moments the result of careful toil and far-sighted expenditure; to wipe
out that which is unique, which no man can replace--the vintage of a
year.

When the hail ceased beating on it, Juliette pushed back the soaked
canvas, which had covered them like a roof, and lifted her face to the
cooler air. The boat was rushing through the water, and close to
Juliette's cheek, just above the gunwale, rose a curved wave, green and
white, and all shimmering with phosphorescence, which seemed to hover
like a hawk above its prey.

The aftermath of the storm was flying overhead in riven ribbons of cloud,
through which the stars were already peeping. To the westward the sky was
clear, and against the last faint glow of the departed sun the lightning
ran hither and thither, skipping and leaping, without sound or
cessation, like fairies dancing.

Immediately overhead, the sail creaked and tugged at its earings, while
the wind sang its high clear song round mast and halliards.

Juliette turned to look at Barebone. He was standing, ankle deep, in
water, leaning backward to windward, in order to give the boat every
pound of weight he could. The lambent summer-lightning on the western
horizon illuminated his face fitfully. In that moment Juliette saw what
is given to few to see and realise--though sailors, perforce, lie down to
sleep knowing it every night--that under Heaven her life was wholly and
solely in the two hands of a fellow-being. She knew it, and saw that
Barebone knew it, though he never glanced at her. She saw the whites of
his eyes gleaming as he looked up, from moment to moment, to the head of
the sail and stooped again to peer under the foot of it into the darkness
ahead. He braced himself, with one foot against the thwart, to haul in a
few inches of sheet, to which the clumsy boat answered immediately. Marie
was praying aloud now, and when she opened her eyes the sight of the
tossing figure in the stern of the boat suddenly turned her terror into
anger.

"Ah!" she cried, "that Jean is a fool. And he, who pretends to have been
a fisherman when he was young--to let us come to our deaths like this!"

She lifted her head, and ducked it again, as a sea jumped up under the
bow and rattled into the boat.

"I see no ship," she cried. "Let us go back, if we can. Name of God!--we
shall be drowned! I see no ship, I tell you!"

"But I do," answered Barebone, shaking the water from his face, for he
had no hand to spare. "But I do, which is more important. And you are not
even wet!"

And he laughed as he brought the boat up into the wind for a few seconds,
to meet a wild gust. Juliette turned in surprise at the sound of his
voice. In the safe and gentle seclusion of the convent-school no one had
thought to teach her that death may be faced with equanimity by others
than the ordained of the Church, and that in the storm and stress of life
men laugh in strange places and at odd times.

Loo was only thinking of his boat and watching the sky for the last of
the storm--that smack, as it were, in the face--with which the Atlantic
ends those black squalls that she sends us, not without thunder and the
curtailed lightning of northern seas. He was planning and shaping his
course; for the watchers on board "The Last Hope" had already seen him,
as he could ascertain by a second light, which suddenly appeared, swung
low, casting a gleam across the surf-strewn water, to show him where the
ladder hung overside.

"Tell Monsieur de Gemosac that I have Mademoiselle and her maid here in
the boat," Barebone called out to Captain Clubbe, whose large face loomed
above the lantern he was holding overside, as he made fast the rope that
had been thrown across his boat and lowered the dripping sail. The water
was smooth enough under the lee of "The Last Hope," which, being deeply
laden, lay motionless at her anchor, with the stream rustling past her
cables.

"Stand up, mademoiselle," said Barebone, himself balanced on the
after-thwart. "Hold on to me, thus, and when I let you go, let yourself
go."

There was no time to protest or to ask questions. And Juliette felt
herself passed on from one pair of strong arms to another, until she was
standing on the deck under the humming rigging, surrounded by men who
seemed huge in their gleaming oil-skins.

"This way, mademoiselle," said one, who was even larger than the others,
in English, of which she understood enough to catch his meaning. "I will
take you to your father. Show a light this way, one of you."

His fingers closed round her arm, and he led her, unconscious of a
strength that almost lifted her from her feet, toward an open door, where
a lamp burnt dimly within. It smelt abominably of an untrimmed wick,
Juliette thought, and the next minute she was kissing her father, who lay
full length on a locker in the little cabin.

She asked him a hundred questions, and waited for few of the answers.
Indeed, she supplied most of them herself; for she was very quick and
gay.

"I see," she cried, "that your foot has been tied up by a sailor. He has
tried to mend it as if it were a broken spar. I suppose that was the
Captain who brought me to you, and then ran away again, as soon as he
could. Yes; I have Marie with me. She is telling them to be careful with
the luggage. I can hear her. I am so glad we had a case of fever at the
school. It was a lay sister, a stupid woman. But how lucky that I should
be at home just when you wanted me!"

She stood upright again, after deftly loosening the bandage round her
father's ankle, and looked at him and laughed.

"Poor, dear old papa," she said. "One sees that you want some one to take
care of you. And this cabin--oh! _mon Dieu_! how bare and uncomfortable!
I suppose men have to go to sea alone because they can persuade no woman
to go with them."

She pounced upon her father again, and arranged afresh the cushions
behind his back, with a little air of patronage and protection. Her back
was turned toward the door, when some one came in, but she heard the
approaching steps and looked quickly round the cabin walls.

"Heavens!" she exclaimed, in a gay whisper. "No looking-glass! One sees
that it is only men who live here."

And she turned, with smiling eyes and a hand upraised to her disordered
hair, to note the new-comer. It was Dormer Colville, who laid aside his
waterproof as he came and greeted her as an old friend. He had, indeed,
known her since her early childhood, and had always succeeded in keeping
pace with her, even in the rapid changes of her last year at school.

"Here is an adventure," he said, shaking hands. "But I can see that you
have taken no harm, and have not even been afraid. For us, it is a
pleasant surprise."

He glanced at her with a smiling approbation, not without a delicate
suggestion of admiration, such as he might well permit himself, and she
might now even consider her due. He was only keeping pace.

"I stayed behind to initiate your maid, who is, of course, unused to a
ship, and the steward speaks but little French. But now they are
arranging your cabin together."

"How delightful!" cried Juliette. "I have never been on a ship before,
you know. And it is all so strange and so nice. All those big men, like
wet ghosts, who said nothing! I think they are more interesting than
women; perhaps it is because they talk less."

"Perhaps it is," admitted Colville, with a sudden gravity, similar to
that with which she had made the suggestion.

"You should hear the Sisters talk--when they are allowed," she said,
confidentially.

"And whisper when they are not. I can imagine it," laughed Colville. "But
now you have left all that behind, and have come out into the world--of
men, one may say. And you have begun at once with an adventure."

"Yes! And we are going to Bordeaux, papa and I, until his foot is well
again. Of course, I was in despair when I was first told of it, but now
that I see him I am no longer anxious. And your messenger assured me that
it was not serious."

She paused to look round the cabin, to make sure that they were alone.

"How strange he is!" she said to both her hearers, in confidence, looking
from one to the other with a quick, bird-like turn of the head and bright
eyes. "I have never seen any one like him."

"No?" said Dormer Colville, encouragingly.

"He said he was an Englishman; but, of course, he is not. He is, French,
and has not the manner of a _bourgeoie_ or a sailor. He has the manner of
an aristocrat--one would say a Royalist--like Albert de Chantonnay, only
a thousand times better."

"Yes," said Colville, glancing at Monsieur de Gemosac.

"More interesting, and so quick and amusing. He spoke of a heritage in
France, and yet he said he was an Englishman. I hope he will secure his
heritage."

"Yes," murmured Colville, still looking at Monsieur de Gemosac.

"And then, when we were in the boat," continued Juliette, still in
confidence to them both, "he changed quite suddenly. He was short and
sharp. He ordered us to do this and that; and one did it, somehow,
without question. Even Marie obeyed him without hesitating, although
she was half mad with fear. We were in danger. I knew that. Any one must
have known it. And yet I was not afraid; I wonder why? And he--he
laughed--that was all. _Mon Dieu!_ he was brave. I never knew that any
one could be so brave!"

She broke off suddenly, with her finger to her lips; for some one had
opened the cabin door. Captain Clubbe came in, filling the whole cabin
with his bulk, and on his heels followed Loo Barebone, his face and hair
still wet and dripping.

"Mademoiselle was wondering," said Dormer Colville, who, it seemed, was
quick to step into that silence which the object of a conversation is apt
to cause--"Mademoiselle was wondering how it was that you escaped
shipwreck in the storm."

"Ah! because one has a star. Even a poor sailor may have a star,
mademoiselle. As well as the Prince Napoleon, who boasts that he has one
of the first magnitude, I understand."

"You are not a poor sailor, monsieur," said Juliette.

"Then who am I?" he asked, with a gay laugh, spreading out his hands and
standing before them, beneath the swinging lamp.

The Marquis de Gemosac raised himself on one elbow.

"I will tell you who you are," he said, in a low, quick voice, pointing
one hand at Loo. "I will tell you." And his voice rose.

"You are the grandson of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. You are the Last
Hope of the French. That is your heritage. Juliette! this is the King of
France!"

Juliette turned and looked at him, with all the colour gone from her
face. Then, instinctively, she dropped on one knee, and before he had
understood, or could stop her, had raised his hand to her lips.




CHAPTER XV

THE TURN OF THE TIDE


"Tide's a-turning, sir," said a voice at the open doorway of the cabin,
and Captain Clubbe turned his impassive face toward Dormer Colville, who
looked oddly white beneath the light of the lamp.

Barebone had unceremoniously dragged his hand away from the hold of
Juliette's fingers. He made a step back and then turned toward the door
at the sound of his shipmate's well-known voice. He stood staring out
into the darkness like one who is walking in his sleep. No one spoke, and
through the open doorways no sound came to them but the song of the wind
through the rigging.

At last Barebone turned, and there was no sign of fear or misgiving in
his face. He looked at Clubbe, and at no one else, as if the Captain and
he were alone in the cabin where they had passed so many years together
in fair weather, to bring out that which is evil in a man, and foul, to
evolve the good.

"What do _you_ say?" he asked, in English, and he must have known that
Captain Clubbe understood French better than he was ready to admit.

Clubbe passed his hand slowly across his cheek and chin, not in order to
gain time, or because he had not an answer ready, but because he came of
a slow-speaking race. His answer had been made ready weeks before while
he sat on the weather-beaten seat set against the wall of "The Black
Sailor" at Farlingford.

"Tide's turned," he answered, simply. "You'd better get your oilskins on
again and go."

"Yes," said Loo, with a queer laugh. "I fancy I shall want my oilskins."

The boat which had been sent from Royan, at the order of the pilot, who
went ashore there, had followed "The Last Hope" up the river, and was now
lying under the English ship's stern awaiting her two passengers and the
turn of the tide.

Dormer Colville glanced at the cabin clock.

"Then," he said, briskly, "let us be going. It will be late enough as it
is before we reach my cousin's house."

He turned and translated his remark for the benefit of the Marquis and
Juliette, remembering that they must needs fail to understand a colloquy
in the muttered and clipped English of the east coast. He was nervously
anxious, it would appear, to tide over a difficult moment; to give Loo
Barebone breathing space, and yet to avoid unnecessary question and
answer. He had not lived forty adventurous years in the world without
learning that it is the word too much which wrecks the majority of human
schemes.

Their preparations had been made beforehand in readiness for the return
of the tide, without the help of which the voyage back to Royan against a
contrary wind must necessarily be long and wearisome.

There was nothing to wait for. Captain Clubbe was not the man to prolong
a farewell or waste his words in wishes for the future, knowing how vain
such must always be. Loo was dazed still by the crash of the storm and
the tension of the effort to bring his boat safely through it.

The rest had not fully penetrated to his inmost mind yet. There had been
only time to act, and none to think, and when the necessity to act was
past, when he found himself crouching down under the weather gunwale of
the French fishing-boat without even the necessity of laying hand on
sheet or tiller, when, at last, he had time to think, he found that the
ability to do so was no longer his. For Fortune, when she lifts up or
casts down, usually numbs the understanding at the first turn of her
wheel, sending her victim staggering on his way a mere machine,
astonishingly alive to the necessity of the immediate moment, careful of
the next step, but capable of looking neither forward nor backward with
an understanding eye.

The waning moon came up at last, behind a distant line of trees on the
Charente side, lighting up with a silver lining the towering clouds of
the storm, which was still travelling eastward, leaving in its wake
battered vines and ruined crops, searing the face of the land as with a
hot iron. Loo lifted his head and looked round him. The owner of the boat
was at the tiller, while his assistant sat amidships, his elbows on his
knees, looking ahead with dreamy eyes. Close to Barebone, crouching from
the wind which blew cold from the Atlantic, was Dormer Colville, affably
silent. If Loo turned to glance at him he looked away, but when his back
was t

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