The Last Hope Part 30

Barebone might succeed in getting far enough away to be lost in the fog.

But in tacking so frequently he was liable to make a mistake. The bigger boat was not so likely to miss stays. He pa.s.sed so close to her that he could read the figures cut on her stern-post indicating her draught of water.

There was another chance. The "Pet.i.te Jeanne" was drawing six feet; the dinghy could sail across a shoal covered by eighteen inches of water. But such a shoal would be clearly visible on the surface of the water.

Besides, there was no shallow like that nearer than the Goodwins.

Barebone pressed out seaward. He knew every channel and every bank between the Thames and Thorpeness. He kept on pressing out to sea by short tacks. All the while he was peeping over the gunwale out of the corner of his eye. He was near, he must be near, a bank covered by five feet of water at low tide. A shoal of five feet is rarely visible on the surface.

Suddenly he rose from his seat on the gunwale, and stood with the tiller in one hand and the sheet in the other, half turning back to look at "Pet.i.te Jeanne" towering almost over him. And as he looked, her bluff black bows rose upward with an odd climbing movement like a horse stepping up a bank. With a rattle of ropes and blocks she stood still.

Barebone went about again and sailed past her.

"_Sans rancune_!" he shouted. But no one heeded him, for they had other matters to attend to. And the dinghy sailed into the veil of the mist toward the land.

CHAPTER XXVI

RETURNED EMPTY

The breeze freshened, and, as was to be expected, blew the fog-bank away before sunset.

Sep Marvin had been an unwilling student all day. Like many of his cloth and generation, Parson Marvin pinned all his faith on education. "Give a boy a good education," he said, a hundred times. "Make a gentleman of him, and you have done your duty by him."

"Make a gentleman of him--and the world will be glad to feed and clothe him," was the real thought in his mind, as it was in the mind of nearly all his contemporaries. The wildest dreamer of those days never antic.i.p.ated that, in the pa.s.sage of one brief generation, social advancement should be for the shrewdly ignorant rather than for the scholar; that it would be better for a man that his mind be stored with knowledge of the world than the wisdom of the cla.s.sics; that the successful grocer might find a kinder welcome in a palace than the scholar; that the manufacturer of kitchen utensils might feed with kings and speak to them, without aspirates, between the courses.

Parson Marvin knew none of these things, however; nor suspected that the advance of civilisation is not always progressive, but that she may take hands with vulgarity and dance down-hill, as she does to-day. His one scheme of life for Sep was that he should be sent to the ancient school where field-sports are cultivated to-day and English gentlemen turned upon the world more ignorant than any other gentlemen in the universe.

Then, of course, Sep must go to that College with which his father's life had been so closely allied. And if it please G.o.d to call him to the Church, and the College should remember that it had given his father a living, and do the same by him--for that reason and no other--then, of course, Sep would be a made man.

And the making of Sep had been in progress during the winter day that a fog-bank came in from the North Sea and clung tenaciously to the low, surfless coast. In the afternoon the sun broke through at last, wintry and pale. Sep, who, by some instinct--the instinct, it is to be supposed, of young animals--knew that he was destined to be of a generation that should cultivate ignorance out of doors, rather than learning by the fireside, threw aside his books and cried out that he could no longer breathe in his father's study.

So Parson Marvin went off, alone, to visit a distant parishioner--one who was dying by himself out on the marsh, in a cottage cut off from all the world in a spring tide.

"Don't forget that it is high tide at five o'clock, and that there is no moon, and that the d.y.k.es will be full. You will never find your way across the marsh after dark," said Sep--the learned in tides and those practical affairs of nature, which were as a closed book to the scholar.

Parson Marvin vaguely acknowledged the warning and went away, leaving Sep to accompany Miriam on her daily errand to the simple shops in Farlingford, which would awake to life and business now that the sea-fog was gone. For the men of Farlingford, like nearly all seafarers, are timorous of bad weather on sh.o.r.e and sit indoors during its pa.s.sage, while they treat storm and rain with a calm contempt at sea.

"Sail a-coming up the river, master," River Andrew said to Sep, who was awaiting Miriam in the village street, and he walked on, without further comment, spade on shoulder, toward the church-yard, where he spent a portion of his day, without apparent effect.

So, when Miriam had done her shopping, it was only natural that they should turn their footsteps toward the quay and the river-wall. Or was it fate? So often is the natural nothing but the inevitable in holiday garb.

"That is no Farlingford boat," said Sep, versed in riverside knowledge, so soon as he saw the balance-lug moving along the line of the river-wall, half a mile below the village.

They stood watching. Few coasters were at sea in these months of wild weather, and there was nothing moving on the quay. The moss-grown slip-way, where "The Last Hope" had been drawn up for repair, stood gaunt and empty, half submerged by the flowing tide. Many Farlingford men were engaged in the winter fisheries on the Dogger, and farther north, in Lowestoft boats. In winter, Farlingford--thrust out into the North Sea, surrounded by marsh--is forgotten by the world.

The solitary boat came round the corner into the wider sheet of water, locally known as Quay Reach.

"A foreigner!" cried Sep, jumping, as was his wont, from one foot to the other with excitement. "It is like the boat that was brought up by the tide, with a dead man in it, long ago. And that was a Belgian boat."

Miriam was looking at the boat with a sudden brightness in her eyes, a rush of colour to her cheeks, which were round and healthy and of that soft clear pink which marks a face swept constantly by mist and a salty air. In flat countries, where men may see each other, unimpeded by hedge or tree or hillock, across a s.p.a.ce measured only by miles, the eye is soon trained--like the sailor's eye--to see and recognise at a great distance.

There was no mistaking the att.i.tude of the solitary steersman of this foreign boat stealing quietly up to Farlingford on the flood tide. It was Loo Barebone sitting on the gunwale as he always sat, with one knee raised on the thwart, to support his elbow, and his chin in the palm of his hand, so that he could glance up the head of the sail or ahead, without needing to change his position.

Sep turned and looked up at her.

"I thought you said he was never coming back," he said, reproachfully.

"So I did. I thought he was never coming back."

Sep looked at her again, and then at the boat. One never knows how much children, and dogs--who live daily with human beings--understand.

"Your face is very red," he observed. "That comes from telling untruths."

"It comes from the cold wind," replied Miriam, with an odd, breathless laugh.

"If we do not go home, he will be there before us," said Sep, gravely.

"He will make one tack across to the other side, and then make the mouth of the creek."

They turned and walked, side by side, on the top of the sea-wall toward the rectory. Their figures must have been outlined against the sky, for any watching from the river. The girl, tall and strong, walking with the ease that comes from health and a steadfast mind; the eager, restless boy running and jumping by her side. Barebone must have seen them as soon as they saw him. They were part of Farlingford, these two. He had a sudden feeling of having been away for years, with this difference--that he came back and found nothing changed. Whereas, in reality, he who returns after a long absence usually finds no one awaiting him.

He did as Sep had foretold--crossing to the far side of the river, and then gaining the mouth of the creek in one tack. Miriam and Sep had reached the rectory garden first, and now stood waiting for him. He came on in silence. Last time--on "The Last Hope"--he had come up the river singing.

Sep waved his hand, and, in response, Barebone nodded his head, with one eye peering ahead, for the breeze was fresh.

The old chain was still there, imperfectly fastened round a tottering post at the foot of the tide-washed steps. It clinked as he made fast the boat. Miriam had not heard the sound of it since that night, long ago, when Loo had gone down the steps in the dark and cast off.

"I was given a pa.s.sage home in a French fishing-boat, and borrowed their dinghy to come ash.o.r.e in," said Loo, as he came up the steps. He knew that Farlingford would want some explanation, and that Sep would be proud to give it. An explanation is never the worse for a spice of truth.

"Miriam told me you were never coming home again," answered Sep, still nourishing that grievance.

"Well, she was wrong, and here I am!" was Loo's reply, with his old, ready laugh. "And here is Farlingford--unchanged, and no harm done."

"Why should there be any harm done?" was Sep's prompt question.

Barebone was shaking hands with Miriam.

"Oh, I don't know," he answered. "Because there always is harm done, I suppose."

Miriam was thinking that he had changed; that the man who had unmoored his boat at these steps six months ago had departed for ever, and that another had come back in his place. A minute later, as he turned to close the gate that shut off the rectory garden from the river-wall, chance ruled it that their eyes should meet for an instant, and she knew that he had not changed; that he might, perhaps, never change so long as he lived. She turned abruptly and led the way to the house.

Sep had a hundred questions to ask, but only a few of them were personal.

Children live in a world of their own, and are not slow to invite those whom they like to come into it, while to the others, they shut the door with a greater frankness than is permissible later in life.

"Father," he explained, "has gone to see old Doy, who is dying."

"Is he still dying? He will never die, I am sure; for he has been trying to do it ever since I remember," laughed Barebone; who was interested, it seemed, in Sep's affairs, and never noticed that Miriam was walking more quickly than they were.

"And I am rather anxious about him," continued Sep, with the gravity that comes of a realised responsibility. "He moons along, you know, with his mind far away, and he doesn't know the path across the marsh a bit. He is bound to lose his way, and it is getting dark. Suppose I shall have to go and look for him."