A MISTAKE
The tide was ebbing still when Barebone loosed his boat, one night, from
the grimy steps leading from the garden of Maiden's Grave farm down to
the creek. It was at the farm-house that Captain Clubbe now lived when on
shore. He had lived there since the death of his brother, two years
earlier--that grim Clubbe of Maiden's Grave, whose methods of life and
agriculture are still quoted on market days from Colchester to Beccles.
The evenings were shorter now, for July was drawing to a close, and the
summer is brief on these coasts. The moon was not up yet, but would soon
rise. Barebone hoisted the great lug-sail, that smelt of seaweed and
tannin. There was a sleepy breeze blowing in from the cooler sea, to take
the place of that hot and shimmering air which had been rising all day
from the corn-fields. He was quicker in his movements than those who
usually handled these stiff ropes and held the clumsy tiller. Quick--and
quiet for once. He had been three nights to the rectory, only to find the
rector there, vaguely kind, looking at him with a watery eye, through the
spectacles which were rarely straight upon his nose, with an unasked
question on his hesitating lips.
For Septimus Marvin knew that Colville, in the name of the Marquis de
Gemosac, had asked Loo Barebone to go to France and institute proceedings
there to recover a great heritage, which it seemed must be his. And
Barebone had laughed and put off his reply from day to day for three
days.
Few knew of it in Farlingford, though many must have suspected the true
explanation of the prolonged stay of the two strangers at the "Black
Sailor." Captain Clubbe and Septimus Marvin, Dormer Colville and Monsieur
de Gemosac shared this knowledge, and awaited, impatiently enough, an
answer which could assuredly be only in the affirmative. Clubbe was busy
enough throughout the day at the old slip-way, where "The Last Hope" was
under repair--the last ship, it appeared likely, that the rotten timbers
could support or the old, old shipwrights mend.
Loo Barebone was no less regular in his attendance at the river-side, and
worked all day, on deck or in the rigging, at leisurely sail-making or
neat seizing of a worn rope. He was gay, and therefore incomprehensible
to a slow-thinking, grave-faced race.
"What do I want with a heritage?" he asked, carelessly. "I am mate of
'The Last Hope'--and that is all. Give me time. I have not made up my
mind yet, but I think it will be No."
And oddly enough, it was Colville who preached patience to his companions
in suspense.
"Give him time," he said. "There can only be one answer to such a
proposal. But he is young. It is not when we are young that we see the
world as it really is, but live in a land of dreams. Give him time."
The Marquis de Gemosac was impatient, however, and was for telling
Barebone more than had been disclosed to him.
"There is no knowing," he cried, "what that _canaille_ is doing in
France."
"There is no knowing," admitted Colville, with his air of suppressing a
half-developed yawn, "but I think we know, all the same--you and I,
Marquis. And there is no hurry."
After three days Loo Barebone had still given no answer. As he hoisted
the sail and felt for the tiller in the dark, he was, perhaps, meditating
on this momentous reply, or perhaps he had made up his mind long before,
and would hold to the decision even to his own undoing, as men do who are
impulsive and not strong. The water lapped and gurgled round the bows,
for the wind was almost ahead, and it was only by nursing the heavy boat
that he saved the necessity of making a tack across the narrow creek.
In the morning he had, as usual, run down into the river and to the
slip-way, little suspecting that Miriam and Sep were just above him
behind the dyke, where they had sat three days before listening to Dormer
Colville's story of the little boy who was a King. To-night he ran the
boat into the coarse and wiry grass where Septimus Marvin's own dinghy
lay, half hidden by the reeds, and he stumbled ashore clutching at the
dewy grass as he climbed the side of the dyke.
He went toward the turf-shelter half despondently, and then stopped
short a few yards away from it. For Miriam was there. He thought she was
alone, and paused to make sure before he spoke. She was sitting at the
far corner, sheltered from the north wind. For Farlingford is like a
ship--always conscious of the lee- and the weather-side, and all who live
there are half sailors in their habits--subservient to the wind.
"At last," said Loo, with a little vexed laugh. He could see her face
turned toward him, but her eyes were only dark shadows beneath her hair.
Her face looked white in the darkness. Her answering laugh had a soothing
note in it.
"Why--at last?" she asked. Her voice was frank and quietly assured in its
friendliness. They were old comrades, it seemed, and had never been
anything else. The best friendship is that which has never known a
quarrel, although poets and others may sing the tenderness of a
reconciliation. The friendship that has a quarrel and a reconciliation in
it is like a man with a weak place left in his constitution by a past
sickness. He may die of something else in the end, but the probability is
that he must reckon at last with that healed sore. The friendship may
perish from some other cause--a marriage, or success in life, one of the
two great severers--but that salved quarrel is more than likely to recur
and kill at last.
These two had never fallen out. And it was the woman who, contrary to
custom, fended the quarrel now.
"Oh! because I have been here three nights in succession, I suppose, and
did not find you here. I was disappointed."
"But you found Uncle Septimus in his study. I could hear you talking
there until quite late."
"Of course I was very glad to see him and talk with him. For it is to him
that I owe a certain half-developed impatience with the uneducated--with
whom I deal all my life, except for a few hours now and then in the study
and here in the turf-shelter with you. I can see--even in the dark--that
you look grave. Do not do that. It is not worth that."
He broke off with his easy laugh, as if to banish any suggestion of
gravity coming from himself.
"It is not worth looking grave about. And I am sorry if I was rude a
minute ago. I had no right, of course, to assume that you would be here.
I suppose it was impertinent--was that it?"
"I will not quarrel," she answered, soothingly--"if that is what you
want."
Her voice was oddly placid. It almost seemed to suggest that she had come
to-night for a certain purpose; that one subject of conversation alone
would interest her, and that to all others she must turn a deaf ear.
He came a little nearer, and, leaning against the turf wall, looked down
at her. He was suddenly grave now. The _róles_ were again reversed; for
it was the woman who was tenacious to one purpose and the man who seemed
inconsequent, flitting from grave to gay, from one thought to another.
His apology had been made graciously enough, but with a queer pride,
quite devoid of the sullenness which marks the pride of the humbly
situated.
"No; I do not want that," he answered. "I want a little sympathy, that is
all; because I have been educated above my station. And I looked for it
from those who are responsible for that which is nearly always a
catastrophe. And it is your uncle who educated me. He is responsible in
the first instance, and, of course, I am grateful to him."
"He could never have educated you," put in Miriam, "if you had not been
ready for the education."
Barebone put aside the point. He must, at all events, have learnt
humility from Septimus Marvin--a quality not natural to his temperament.
"And you are responsible, as well," he went on, "because you have taught
me a use for the education."
"Indeed!" she said, gently and interrogatively, as if at last he had
reached the point to which she wished to bring him.
"Yes; the best use to which I could ever put it. To talk to you on an
equality."
He looked hard at her through the darkness, which was less intense now;
for the moon was not far below the horizon. Her face looked white, and he
thought that she was breathing quickly. But they had always been friends;
he remembered that just in time.
"It is only natural that I should look forward, when we are at sea, to
coming back here--" He paused and kicked the turf-wall with his heel, as
if to remind her that she had sat in the same corner before and he had
leant against the same wall, talking to her. "They are good fellows, of
course, with a hundred fine qualities which I lack, but they do not
understand half that one may say, or think--even the Captain. He is well
educated, in his way, but it is only the way of a coasting-captain who
has risen by his merits to the command of a foreign-going ship."
Miriam gave an impatient little sigh. He had veered again from the point.
"You think that I forget that he is my relative," said Loo, sharply,
detecting in his quickness of thought a passing resentment. "I do not. I
never forget that. I am the son of his cousin. I know that, and thus
related to many in Farlingford. But I have never called him cousin, and
he has never asked me to."
"No," said Miriam, with averted eyes, in that other voice, which made him
turn and look at her, catching his breath.
"Oh!" he said, with a sudden laugh of comprehension. "You have heard
what, I suppose, is common talk in Farlingford. You know what has brought
these people here--this Monsieur de Gemosac, and the other--what is his
name? Dormer Colville. You have heard of my magnificent possibilities.
And I--I had forgotten all about them."
He threw out his arms in a gesture of gay contempt; for even in the
dark he could not refrain from adding to the meaning of mere words a
hundred-fold by the help of his lean hands and mobile face.
"I have heard of it, of course," she admitted, "from several people. But
I have heard most from Captain Clubbe. He takes it more seriously than
you do. You do not know, because he is one of those men who are most
silent with those to whom they are most attached. He thinks that it is
providential that my uncle should have had the desire to educate you, and
that you should have displayed such capacity to learn."
"Capacity?" he protested--"say genius! Do not let us do things by halves.
Genius to learn--yes; go on."
"Ah! you may laugh," Miriam said, lightly, "but it is serious enough. You
will find circumstances too strong for you. You will have to go to France
to claim your--heritage."
"Not I, if it means leaving Farlingford for ever and going to live among
strange people, like the Marquis de Gemosac, for instance, who gives me
the impression of a thousand petty ceremonies and a million futile
memories."
He turned and lifted his face to the breeze which blew from the sea over
flat stretches of sand and seaweed--the crispest, most invigorating air
in the world except that which blows on the Baltic shores.
"I prefer Farlingford. I am half a Clubbe--and the other half!--Heaven
knows what that is! The offshoot of some forgotten seedling blown away
from France by a great storm. If my father knew, he never said anything.
And if he knew, and said nothing, one may be sure that it was because
he was ashamed of what he knew. You never saw him, or you would have
known his dread of France, or anything that was French. He was a man
living in a dream. His body was here in Farlingford, but his mind was
elsewhere--who knows where? And at times I feel that, too--that
unreality--as if I were here, and somewhere else at the same time. But
all the same, I prefer Farlingford, even if it is a dream."
The moon had risen at last; a waning half-moon, lying low and yellow in
the sky, just above the horizon, casting a feeble light on earth. Loo
turned and looked at Miriam, who had always met his glance with her
thoughtful, steady eyes. But now she turned away.
"Farlingford is best, at all events," he said, with an odd conviction. "I
am only the grandson of old Seth Clubbe, of Maiden's Grave. I am a
Farlingford sailor, and that is all. I am mate of 'The Last Hope'--at
your service."
"You are more than that."
He made a step nearer to her, looking down at her white face, averted
from him. For her voice had been uncertain--unsteady--as if she were
speaking against her will.
"Even if I am only that," he said, suddenly grave, "Farlingford may still
be a dream--Farlingford and--you."
"What do you mean?" she asked, in a quick, mechanical voice, as if she
had reached a desired crisis at last and was prepared to act.
"Oh, I only mean what I have meant always," he answered. "But I have been
afraid--afraid. One hears, sometimes, of a woman who is generous enough
to love a man who is a nobody--to think only of love. Sometimes--last
voyage, when you used to sit where you are sitting now--I have thought
that it might have been my extraordinary good fortune to meet such a
woman."
He waited for some word or sign, but she sat motionless.
"You understand," he went on, "how contemptible must seem their talk of a
heritage in France, when such a thought is in one's mind, even if--"
"Yes," she interrupted, hastily. "You were quite wrong. You were
mistaken."
"Mistaking in thinking you--"
"Yes," she interrupted again. "You are quite mistaken, and I am very
sorry, of course, that it should have happened."
She was singularly collected, and spoke in a matter-of-fact voice.
Barebone's eyes gleamed suddenly; for she had aroused-perhaps
purposely--a pride which must have accumulated in his blood through
countless generations. She struck with no uncertain hand.
"Yes," he said, slowly; "it is to be regretted. Is it because I am the
son of a nameless father and only the mate of 'The Last Hope'?"
"If you were before the mast--" she answered--"if you were a King, it
would make no difference. It is simply because I do not care for you in
that way."
"You do not care for me--in that way," he echoed, with a laugh, which
made her move as if she were shrinking. "Well, there is nothing more to
be said to that."
He looked at her slowly, and then took off his cap as if to bid her
good-bye. But he forgot to replace it, and he went away with the cap in
his hand. She heard the clink of a chain as he loosed his boat.