THE TURN OF THE TIDE
"Tide's a-turning, sir," said a voice at the open doorway of the cabin,
and Captain Clubbe turned his impassive face toward Dormer Colville, who
looked oddly white beneath the light of the lamp.
Barebone had unceremoniously dragged his hand away from the hold of
Juliette's fingers. He made a step back and then turned toward the door
at the sound of his shipmate's well-known voice. He stood staring out
into the darkness like one who is walking in his sleep. No one spoke, and
through the open doorways no sound came to them but the song of the wind
through the rigging.
At last Barebone turned, and there was no sign of fear or misgiving in
his face. He looked at Clubbe, and at no one else, as if the Captain and
he were alone in the cabin where they had passed so many years together
in fair weather, to bring out that which is evil in a man, and foul, to
evolve the good.
"What do _you_ say?" he asked, in English, and he must have known that
Captain Clubbe understood French better than he was ready to admit.
Clubbe passed his hand slowly across his cheek and chin, not in order to
gain time, or because he had not an answer ready, but because he came of
a slow-speaking race. His answer had been made ready weeks before while
he sat on the weather-beaten seat set against the wall of "The Black
Sailor" at Farlingford.
"Tide's turned," he answered, simply. "You'd better get your oilskins on
again and go."
"Yes," said Loo, with a queer laugh. "I fancy I shall want my oilskins."
The boat which had been sent from Royan, at the order of the pilot, who
went ashore there, had followed "The Last Hope" up the river, and was now
lying under the English ship's stern awaiting her two passengers and the
turn of the tide.
Dormer Colville glanced at the cabin clock.
"Then," he said, briskly, "let us be going. It will be late enough as it
is before we reach my cousin's house."
He turned and translated his remark for the benefit of the Marquis and
Juliette, remembering that they must needs fail to understand a colloquy
in the muttered and clipped English of the east coast. He was nervously
anxious, it would appear, to tide over a difficult moment; to give Loo
Barebone breathing space, and yet to avoid unnecessary question and
answer. He had not lived forty adventurous years in the world without
learning that it is the word too much which wrecks the majority of human
schemes.
Their preparations had been made beforehand in readiness for the return
of the tide, without the help of which the voyage back to Royan against a
contrary wind must necessarily be long and wearisome.
There was nothing to wait for. Captain Clubbe was not the man to prolong
a farewell or waste his words in wishes for the future, knowing how vain
such must always be. Loo was dazed still by the crash of the storm and
the tension of the effort to bring his boat safely through it.
The rest had not fully penetrated to his inmost mind yet. There had been
only time to act, and none to think, and when the necessity to act was
past, when he found himself crouching down under the weather gunwale of
the French fishing-boat without even the necessity of laying hand on
sheet or tiller, when, at last, he had time to think, he found that the
ability to do so was no longer his. For Fortune, when she lifts up or
casts down, usually numbs the understanding at the first turn of her
wheel, sending her victim staggering on his way a mere machine,
astonishingly alive to the necessity of the immediate moment, careful of
the next step, but capable of looking neither forward nor backward with
an understanding eye.
The waning moon came up at last, behind a distant line of trees on the
Charente side, lighting up with a silver lining the towering clouds of
the storm, which was still travelling eastward, leaving in its wake
battered vines and ruined crops, searing the face of the land as with a
hot iron. Loo lifted his head and looked round him. The owner of the boat
was at the tiller, while his assistant sat amidships, his elbows on his
knees, looking ahead with dreamy eyes. Close to Barebone, crouching from
the wind which blew cold from the Atlantic, was Dormer Colville, affably
silent. If Loo turned to glance at him he looked away, but when his back
was turned Loo was conscious of watching eyes, full of sympathy, almost
uncomfortably quick to perceive the inward working of another's mind, and
suit his own thereto.
Thus the boat plunged out toward the sea and the flickering lights that
mark the channel, tacking right across to that spit of land lying between
the Gironde and the broad Atlantic, where grows a wine without match in
all the world. Thus Loo Barebone turned his back on the ship which had
been his home so long and set out into a new world; a new and unknown
life, with the Marquis de Gemosac's ringing words buzzing in his brain
yet; with the warm touch of Juliette's lips burning still upon his hand.
"You are the grandson of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette! You are the Last
Hope of France!"
And he remembered the lights and shadows on Juliette's hair as he looked
down upon her bent head.
Colville was talking to the "patron" now. He knew the coast, it seemed,
and, somewhere or other, had learnt enough of such matters of local
seafaring interest as to set the fisherman at his ease and make him talk.
They were arranging where to land, and Colville was describing the exact
whereabouts of a little jetty used for bathing purposes, which ran out
from the sandy shore, quite near to Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence's house, in
the pine-trees, two miles south of Royan. It was no easy matter to find
this spot by the dim light of a waning moon, and, half-mechanically, Loo
joined in the search, and presently, when the jetty was reached, helped
to make fast in a choppy sea.
They left the luggage on the jetty and walked across the silent sand side
by side.
"There," said Colville, pointing forward. "It is through that opening in
the pine-trees. A matter of five minutes and we shall be at my cousin's
house."
"It is very kind of Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence," answered Barebone,
"to--well, to take me up. I suppose that is the best way to look at it."
Colville laughed quietly.
"Yes--put it thus, if you like," he said. They walked on in silence for a
few yards, and then Dormer Colville slipped his hand within his
companion's arm, as was the fashion among men even in England in those
more expansive days.
"I think I know how you feel," he said, suiting his step to Barebone's.
"You must feel like a man who is set down to a table to play a game of
which he knows nothing, and on taking up his cards finds that he holds a
hand all courtcards and trumps--and he doesn't know how to play them."
Barebone made no answer. He had yet to unlearn Captain Clubbe's
unconscious teaching that a man's feelings are his own concern and no
other has any interest or right to share in them, except one woman, and
even she must guess the larger half.
"But as the game progresses," went on Colville, reassuringly, "you will
find out how it is played. You will even find that you are a skilled
player, and then the gambler's spirit will fire your blood and arouse
your energies. You will discover what a damned good game it is. The great
game--Barebone--the great game! And France is the country to play it in."
He stamped his foot on the soil of France as he spoke.
"The moment I saw you I knew that you would do. No man better fitted to
play the game than yourself; for you have wit and quickness," went on
this friend and mentor, with a little pressure on his companion's arm.
"But--you will have to put your back into it, you know."
"What do you mean?"
"Well--I noticed at Farlingford a certain reluctance to begin. It is in
the blood, I suppose. There is, you know, in the Bourbon blood a certain
strain of--well, let us say of reluctance to begin. Others call it by a
different name. One is not a Bourbon for nothing, I suppose. And
everything--even if it be a vice--that serves to emphasise identity is to
be cultivated. But, as I say, you will have to put your back into it
later on. At present there will be less to do. You will have to play
close and hold your hand, and follow any lead that is given you by de
Gemosac, or by my humble self. You will find that easy enough, I know.
For you have all a Frenchman's quickness to understand. And I suppose--to
put it plainly as between men of the world--now that you have had time to
think it over--you are not afraid, Barebone?"
"Oh no!" laughed Barebone. "I am not afraid."
"One is not a Barebone--or a Bourbon--for nothing," observed Colville, in
an aside to himself. "Gad! I wish I could say that I should not be afraid
myself under similar circumstances. My heart was in my mouth, I can tell
you, in that cabin when de Gemosac blurted it all out. It came suddenly
at the end, and--well!--it rather hit one in the wind. And, as I say, one
is not a Bourbon for nothing. You come into a heritage, eight hundred
years old, of likes and dislikes, of genius and incapacity, of an
astounding cleverness, and a preposterous foolishness without compare in
the history of dynasties. But that doesn't matter nowadays. This is a
progressive age, you know; even the Bourbons cannot hold back the advance
of the times."
"I come into a heritage of friends and of enemies," said Barebone,
gaily--"all ready made. That seems to me more important."
"Gad! you are right," exclaimed Colville. "I said you would do the moment
I saw you step ashore at Farlingford. You have gone right to the heart of
the question at the first bound. It is your friends and your enemies that
will give you trouble."
"More especially my friends," suggested Loo, with a light laugh.
"Right again," answered Colville, glancing at him sideways beneath the
brim of his hat. And there was a little pause before he spoke again.
"You have probably learnt how to deal with your enemies at sea," he said
thoughtfully at length. "Have you ever noticed how an English ship comes
into a foreign harbour and takes her berth at her moorings? There is
nothing more characteristic of the nation. And one captain is like
another. No doubt you have seen Clubbe do it a hundred times. He comes
in, all sail set, and steers straight for the berth he has chosen. And
there are always half a dozen men in half a dozen small boats who go out
to meet him. They stand up and wave their arms, and point this way and
that. They ask a hundred questions, and with their hands round their
faces, shout their advice. And in answer to one and the other the Captain
looks over the side and says, 'You be damned.' That will be the way to
deal with some of your friends and all your enemies alike, Barebone, if
you mean to get on in France. You will have to look over the side at the
people in small boats who are shouting and say, 'You be damned.'"
They were at the gate of a house now, set down in a clearing amid the
pine-trees.
"This is my cousin's house," said Dormer Colville. "It is to be your home
for the present. And you need not scruple, as she will tell you, to
consider it so. It is not a time to think of obligations, you understand,
or to consider that you are running into any one's debt. You may remember
that afterward, perhaps, but that is as may be. For the present there is
no question of obligations. We are all in the same boat--all playing the
same game."
And he laughed below his breath as he closed the gate with caution; for
it was late and the house seemed to hold none but sleepers.
"As for my cousin herself," he continued, as they went toward the door,
"you will find her easy to get on with--a clever woman, and a
good-looking one. _Du reste_--it is not in that direction that your
difficulties will lie. You will find it easy enough to get on with the
women of the party, I fancy--from what I have observed."
And again he seemed to be amused.