The Last Hope Part 31

"With a lantern," suggested Loo, darkly, without looking toward Miriam.

"Oh, yes!" replied Sep, with delight. "With a lantern, of course. n.o.body but a fool would go out on to the marshes after dark without a lantern.

The weed on the water makes it the same as the gra.s.s, and that old woman who was nearly drowned last winter, you know, she walked straight in, and thought it was dry land."

And Loo heard no more, for they were at the door; and Miriam, in the lighted hall, was waiting for them, with all the colour gone from her face.

"He is sure to be in in a few minutes," she said; for she had heard the end of their talk. She could scarcely have helped hearing Loo's weighty suggestion of a lantern, which had had the effect he must have antic.i.p.ated. Sep was already hurriedly searching for matches. It would be difficult to dissuade him from his purpose. What boy would willingly give up the prospect of an adventure on the marsh alone, with a bull's-eye?

Miriam tried, and tried in vain. She gained time, however, and was listening for Marvin's footstep on the gravel all the while.

Sep found the matches--and it chanced that there was a sufficiency of oil in his lantern. He lighted up and went away, leaving an abominable smell of untrimmed wick behind him.

It was tea-time, and, half a century ago, that meal was a matter of greater importance than it is to-day. A fire burned in the dining-room, glowing warmly on the mellow walls and gleaming furniture; but there was no lamp, nor need of one, in a room with large windows facing the sunset sky.

Miriam led the way into this room, and lifted the shining, old-fashioned kettle to the hob. She took a chair that stood near, and sat, with her shoulder turned toward him, looking into the fire.

"We will have tea as soon as they come in," she said, in that voice of camaraderie which speaks of a life-long friendship between a man and a woman--if such a friendship be possible. Is it?--who knows? "They will not be long, I am sure. You will like tea, after having been so long abroad. It is one of the charms of coming home, or one of the alleviations. I don't know which. And now, tell me all that has happened since you went away--if you care to."

CHAPTER XXVII

OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF BABES

Miriam's manner toward him was the same as it had always been so long as he could remember. He had once thought--indeed, he had made to her the accusation--that she was always conscious of the social gulf existing between them; that she always remembered that she was by birth and breeding a lady, whereas he was the son of an obscure Frenchman who was nothing but a clockmaker whose name could be read (and can to this day be deciphered) on a hundred timepieces in remote East Anglian farms.

Since his change of fortune he had, as all men who rise to a great height or sink to the depths will tell, noted a corresponding change in his friends. Even Captain Clubbe had altered, and the affection which peeped out at times almost against his puritanical will seemed to have suffered a chill. The men of Farlingford, and even those who had sailed in "The Last Hope" with him, seemed to hold him at a distance. They nodded to him with a brief, friendly smile, but were shy of shaking hands. The hand which they would have held out readily enough, had he needed a.s.sistance in misfortune, slunk hastily into a pocket. For he who climbs will lose more friends than the ne'er-do-well. Some may account this to human nature for righteousness and others quite the contrary: for jealousy, like love, lies hidden in unsuspected corners.

Juliette do Gemosac had been quite different to Loo since learning his story. Miriam alone remained unchanged. He had accused her of failing to rise superior to arbitrary social distinctions, and now, standing behind her in the fire-lit dining-room of the rectory, he retracted that accusation once and for all time in his own heart, though her justification came from a contrary direction to that from which it might have been expected.

Miriam alone remained a friend--and nothing else, he added, bitterly, in his own heart. And she seemed to a.s.sume that their friendship, begun in face of social distinctions, should never have to suffer from that burthen.

"I should like to hear," she repeated, seeing that he was silent, "all that has happened since you went away; all that you may care to tell me."

"My heritage, you mean?"

She moved in her seat but did not look round. She had laid aside her hat on coming into the house, and as she sat, leaning forward with her hands clasped together in her lap, gazing thoughtfully at the fire which glowed blue and white for the salt water that was in the drift-wood, her hair, loosened by the wind, half concealed her face.

"Yes," she answered, slowly.

"Do you know what it is--my heritage?" lapsing, as he often did when hurried by some pressing thought, into a colloquialism half French.

She shook her head, but made no audible reply.

"Do you suspect what it is?" he insisted.

"I may have suspected, perhaps," she admitted, after a pause.

"When? How long?"

She paused again. Quick and clever as he was, she was no less so. She weighed the question. Perhaps she found no answer to it, for she turned toward the door that stood open and looked out into the hall. The light of the lamp there fell for a moment across her face.

"I think I hear them returning," she said.

"No," he retorted, "for I should hear them before you did. I was brought up at sea. Do not answer the question, however, if you would rather not.

You ask what has happened since I went away. A great many things have happened which are of no importance. Such things always happen, do they not? But one night, when we were quarrelling, Dormer Colville mentioned your name. He was very much alarmed and very angry, so he perhaps spoke the truth--by accident. He said that you had always known that I might be the King of France. Many things happened, as I tell you, which are of no importance, and which I have already forgotten, but that I remember and always shall."

"I have always known," replied Miriam, "that Mr. Dormer Colville is a liar. It is written on his face, for those who care to read."

A woman at bay is rarely merciful.

"And I thought for an instant," pursued Loo, "that such a knowledge might have been in your mind that night, the last I was here, last summer, on the river-wall. I had a vague idea that it might have influenced in some way the reply you gave me then."

He had come a step nearer and was standing over her. She could hear his hurried breathing.

"Oh, no," she replied, in a calm voice full of friendliness. "You are quite wrong. The reason I gave you still holds good, and--and always will."

In the brief silence that followed this clear statement of affairs, they both heard the rattle of the iron gate by the seawall. Sep and his father were coming. Loo turned to look toward the hall and the front door, dimly visible in the shadow of the porch. While he did so Miriam pa.s.sed her hand quickly across her face. When Loo turned again and glanced down at her, her att.i.tude was unchanged.

"Will you look at me and say that again?" he asked, slowly.

"Certainly," she replied. And she rose from her chair. She turned and faced him with the light of the hall-lamp full upon her. She was smiling and self-confident.

"I thought," he said, looking at her closely, "as I stood behind you, that there were tears in your eyes."

She went past him into the hall to meet Sep and his father, who were already on the threshold.

"It must have been the firelight," she said to Barebone as she pa.s.sed him.

A minute later Septimus Marvin was shaking him by the hand with a vague and uncertain but kindly grasp.

"Sep came running to tell me that you were home again," he said, struggling out of his overcoat. "Yes--yes. Home again to the old place.

And little changed, I can see. Little changed, my boy. _Tempora mutantur_, eh? and we _mutamur in illis_. But you are the same."

"Of course. Why should I change? It is too late to change for the better now."

"Never! Never say that. But we do not want you to change. We looked for you to come in a coach-and-four--did we not, Miriam? For I suppose you have secured your heritage, since you are here again. It is a great thing to possess riches--and a great responsibility. Come, let us have tea and not think of such things. Yes--yes. Let us forget that such a thing as a heritage ever came between us--eh, Miriam?"

And with a gesture of old-world politeness he stood aside for his niece to pa.s.s first into the dining-room, whither a servant had preceded them with a lamp.

"It will not be hard to do that," replied Miriam, steadily, "because he tells me that he has not yet secured it."

"All in good time--all in good time," said Marvin, with that faith in some occult power, seemingly the Government and Providence working in conjunction, to which parsons and many women confide their worldly affairs and sit with folded hands.

He asked many questions which were easy enough to answer; for he had no worldly wisdom himself, and did not look for it in other people. And then he related his own adventure--the great incident of his life--his visit to Paris.

"A matter of business," he explained. "Some duplicates--one or two of my prints which I had decided to part with. Miriam also wished me to see into some small money matters of her own. Her guardian, John Turner, you may remember, resides in Paris. A schoolfellow of my own, by the way. But our ways diverged later in life. I found him unchanged--a kind heart--always a kind heart. He attempts to conceal it, as many do, under a flippant, almost a profane, manner of speech. _Brutum fulmen._ But I saw through it--I saw through it."