The Last Hope Part 34

"Who makes the offer?" he asked.

Turner smiled on him with visible approbation as upon a quick and worthy foe who fought a capable fight with weapons above the board.

"No matter--since you are disposed to refuse. The money is in my hands, as is the offer. Both are good. Both will hold good till to-morrow morning."

Septimus Marvin gave a little exclamation of approval. He had been sitting by the table looking from one to the other over his spectacles with the eager smile of the listener who understands very little, and while wishing that he understood more, is eager to put in a word of approval or disapprobation on safe and general lines. It was quite obvious to John Turner, who had entered the room in ignorance on this point, that Marvin knew nothing of Barebone's heritage in France while Miriam knew all.

"There is one point," he said, "which is perhaps scarcely worth mentioning. The man who makes the offer is not _only the most unscrupulous_, but is likely to become one of the most powerful men in Eur--men I know. There is a reverse side to the medal. There always is a reverse side to the good things of this world. Should you refuse his ridiculously generous offer you will make an enemy for life--one who is nearing that point where men stop at nothing."

Turner glanced at Miriam again. Her clean-cut features had a stony stillness and her eyes looked obstinately at the clock. The banker moved in his chair as if suddenly conscious that it was time to go.

"Do not," he said to Barebone, "be misled or mislead yourself into a false estimate of the strength of your own case. The offer I make you does not in any way indicate that you are in a strong position. It merely shows the indolence of a man naturally open-handed, who would always rather pay than fight."

"Especially if the money is not his own."

"Yes," admitted Turner, stolidly, "that is so. Especially if the money is not his own. I dare say you know the weakness of your own case: others know it too. A portrait is not much to go on. Portraits are so easily copied; so easily changed."

He rose as he spoke and shook hands with Marvin.

Then he turned to Miriam, but he did not meet her glance. Last of all he shook hands with Barebone.

"Sleep on it," he said. "Nothing like sleeping on a question. I am staying at 'The Black Sailor.' See you tomorrow."

He had come, had transacted his business and gone, all in less than an hour, with an extraordinary leisureliness almost amounting to indolence.

He had lounged into the house, and now he departed without haste or explanation. Never hurry, never explain, was the text upon which John Turner seemed to base the sleepy discourse of his life. For each of us is a living sermon to his fellows, and, it is to be feared, the majority are warnings.

Turner had dragged on his thick overcoat, not without Loo's a.s.sistance, and, with the collar turned up about his ears, he went out into the night, leaving the three persons whom he had found in the drawing-room standing in the hall looking at the door which he closed decisively behind him. "Seize your happiness while you can," he had urged. "If not--" and the decisive closing of a door on his departing heel said the rest.

The clocks struck ten. It was not worth while going back to the drawing-room. All Farlingford was abed in those days by nine o'clock.

Barebone took his coat and prepared to follow Turner. Miriam was already lighting her bedroom candle. She bade the two men good night and went slowly upstairs. As she reached her own room she heard the front door closed behind Loo and the rattle of the chain under the uncertain fingers of Septimus Marvin. The sound of it was like the clink of that other chain by which Barebone had made fast his boat to the tottering post on the river-wall.

Miriam's room was at the front of the house, and its square Georgian windows faced eastward across the river to the narrow spit of marsh-land and the open sea beyond it. A crescent of moon far gone on the wane, yellow and forlorn, was rising from the sea. An uncertain path of light lay across the face of the far-off tide-way--broken by a narrow strip of darkness and renewed again close at hand across the wide river almost to the sea-wall beneath the window. From this window no house could be seen by day--nothing but a vast expanse of water and land hardly less level and unbroken. No light was visible on sea or land now, nothing but the waning moon in a cold clear sky.

Miriam threw herself, all dressed, on her bed with the abandonment of one who is worn out by some great effort, and buried her face in the pillow.

Barebone's way lay to the left along the river-wall by the side of the creek. Turner had gone to the right, taking the path that led down the river to the old quay and the village. Whereas Barebone must turn his back on Farlingford to reach the farm which still crouches behind a shelter of twisted oaks and still bears the name of Maiden's Grave; though the name is now nothing but a word. For no one knows who the maiden was, or where her grave, or what brought her to it.

The crescent moon gave little light, but Loo knew his way beneath the stunted cedars and through the barricade of ilex drawn round the rectory on the northern side. His eyes, trained to darkness, saw the shadowy form of a man awaiting him beneath the cedars almost as soon as the door was closed.

He went toward him, perceiving with a sudden misgiving that it was not John Turner. A momentary silhouette against the northern sky showed that it was Colville, come at last.

"Quick--this way!" he whispered, and taking Barebone's arm he led him through the bushes. He halted in a little open s.p.a.ce between the ilex and the river-wall, which is fifteen feet high at the meeting of the creek and the larger stream. "There are three men, who are not Farlingford men, on the outer side of the sea-wall below the rectory landing. Turner must have placed them there. I'll be even with him yet. There is a large fishing-smack lying at anchor inside the Ness--just across the marsh. It is the 'Pet.i.te Jeanne.' I found this out while you were in there. I could hear your voices."

"Could you hear what he said?"

"No," answered Colville, with a sudden return to his old manner, easy and sympathetic. "No--this is no time for joking, I can tell you that. You have had a narrow escape, I a.s.sure you, Barebone. That man, the Captain of the 'Pet.i.te Jeanne,' is well known. There are plenty of people in France who want to get quietly rid of some family enc.u.mbrance--a man in the way, you understand, a son too many, a husband too much, a stepson who will inherit--the world is full of superfluities. Well, the Captain of the 'Pet.i.te Jeanne' will take them a voyage for their health to the Iceland fisheries. They are so far and so remote--the Iceland fisheries.

The climate is bad and accidents happen. And if the 'Pet.i.te Jeanne'

returns short-handed, as she often does, the other boats do the same. It is only a question of a few entries in the custom-house books at Fecamp.

Do you see?"

"Yes," admitted Barebone, thoughtfully. "I see."

"I suppose it suggested itself to you when you were on board, and that is why you took the first chance of escape."

"Well, hardly; but I escaped, so it does not matter."

"No." acquiesced Colville. "It doesn't matter. But how are we to get out of this? They are waiting for us under the sea-wall. Is there a way across the marsh?"

"Yes--I know a way. But where do you want to go to-night?"

"Out of this," whispered Colville, eagerly. "Out of Farlingford and Suffolk before the morning if we can. I tell you there is a French gunboat at Harwich, and another in the North Sea. It may be chance and it may not. But I suspect there is a warrant out against you. And, failing that, there is the 'Pet.i.te Jeanne' hanging about waiting to kidnap you a second time. And Turner's at the bottom of it, d.a.m.n him!"

Again Dormer Colville allowed a glimpse to appear of another man quite different from the easy, indolent man-of-the-world, the well-dressed adventurer of a day when adventure was mostly sought in drawing-rooms, when scented and curled dandies were made or marred by women. For a moment Colville was roused to anger and seemed capable of manly action.

But in an instant the humour pa.s.sed and he shrugged his shoulders and gave a short, indifferent laugh beneath his breath.

"Come," he said, "lead the way and I will follow. I have been out here since eight o'clock and it is deucedly cold. I followed Turner from Paris, for I knew he was on your scent. Once across the marsh we can talk without fear as we go along."

Barebone obeyed mechanically, leading the way through the bushes to the kitchen-garden and over an iron fencing on to the open marsh. This stretched inland for two miles without a hedge or other fence but the sunken d.y.k.es which intersected it across and across. Any knowing his way could save two miles on the longer way by the only road connecting Farlingford with the mainland and tapping the great road that runs north and south a few miles inland.

There was no path, for few ever pa.s.sed this way. By day, a solitary shepherd watched his flocks here. By night the marsh was deserted. Across some of the d.y.k.es a plank is thrown, the whereabouts of which is indicated by a post, waist-high, driven into the ground, easily enough seen by day, but hard to find after dark. Not all the d.y.k.es have a plank, and for the most part the marsh is divided into squares, each only connected at one point with its neighbour.

Barebone knew the way as well as any in Farlingford, and he struck out across the thick gra.s.s which crunched briskly under the foot, for it was coated with rime, and the icy wind blew in from the sea a freezing mist.

Once or twice Barebone, having made a bee-line across from d.y.k.e to d.y.k.e, failed to strike the exact spot where the low post indicated a plank, and had to pause and stoop down so as to find its silhouette against the sky.

When they reached a plank he tried its strength with one foot and then led the way across it, turning and waiting at the far end for Colville to follow. It was unnecessary to warn him against a slip, for the plank was no more than nine inches wide and shone white with rime. Each foot must be secure before its fellow was lifted.

Colville, always ready to fall in with a companion's humour, ever quick to understand the thoughts of others, respected his silence. Perhaps he was not far from guessing the cause of it.

Loo was surprised to find that Dormer Colville was less antipathetic than he had antic.i.p.ated. For the last month, night and day, he had dreaded Colville's arrival, and now that he was here he was almost glad to see him; almost glad to quit Farlingford. And his heart was hot with anger against Miriam.

Turner's offer had at all events been worth considering. Had he been alone when it was made he would certainly have considered it; he would have turned it this way and that. He would have liked to play with it as a cat plays with a mouse, knowing all the while that he must refuse in the end. Perhaps Turner had made the offer in Miriam's presence, expecting to find in her a powerful ally. It was only natural for him to think this. Ever since the beginning, men have a.s.signed to women the role of the dissuader, the drag, the hinderer. It is always the woman, tradition tells us, who persuades the man to be a coward, to stay at home, to shirk a difficult or a dangerous duty.

As a matter of fact, Turner had made this mistake. He had always wondered why Miriam Liston elected to live at Farlingford when with her wealth and connections, both in England and France, she might live a gayer life elsewhere. There must, he reflected, be some reason for it.

When whosoever does anything slightly unconventional or leaves undone what custom and gossip make almost obligatory, a relation or a mere interfering neighbour is always at hand to wag her head and say there must be some reason for it. Which means, of course, one specific reason.

And the worst of it is that she is nearly always right.

John Turner, laboriously putting two small numerals together, after his manner, had concluded that Loo Barebone was the reason. Even banking may, it seems, be carried on without the loss of all human weakness, especially if the banker be of middle age, unmarried, and deprived by an unromantic superfluity of adipose tissue of the possibility of living through a romance of his own. Turner had consented to countenance, if not actually to take part in, a nefarious scheme, to rid France and the present government of one who might easily bring about its downfall, on certain conditions. Knowing quite well that Loo Barebone could take care of himself at sea, and was quite capable of effecting an escape if he desired it, he had put no obstacle in the way of the usual voyage to the Iceland fisheries. Since those days many governments in France have invented many new methods of disposing of a political foe. Dormer Colville was only antic.i.p.ating events when he took away the character of the Captain of the "Pet.i.te Jeanne."

Turner had himself proposed this alternative method of securing Barebone's silence. He had even named the sum. He had seized the excellent opportunity of laying it before Barebone in the quiet intimacy of the rectory drawing-room with Miriam in the soft lamp-light beside him, with the scent of the violets at her breast mingling with the warm smell of the wood fire.

And Barebone had laughed at the offer.

CHAPTER x.x.x

IN THE FURROW AGAIN