The Last Hope Part 4

"He is no sailor at heart," commented Colville. "He never even glanced at his s.h.i.+p."

"And yet it was he who steered the s.h.i.+p 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 d.y.k.e, 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 d.y.k.e 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 d.y.k.e. It was a quiet evening, and the rector was walking slowly backward and forward on the raised path, made on the d.y.k.e itself, like a s.h.i.+p-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 G.o.dbold is gone--the last of the G.o.dbolds 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 att.i.tude towards Barebone was that of an admiring younger brother.

"Sep," he said, "your extra half-hour has pa.s.sed. 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 d.y.k.e, 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 att.i.tude, 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 friends.h.i.+p, or a close _camaraderie_, resulting from common interests or a common endeavour.

"Why should I go away?" she asked.