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_.