After a hurried consultation, Septimus Marvin was deputed to follow
the injured man and take him home, seeing that he had as yet but half
recovered his senses. This good Samaritan had scarcely disappeared when
a shout from the beach drew the attention of all in another direction.
One of the outposts was running toward the fire, waving his lantern and
shouting incoherently. It was a coastguard.
“Comin' ashore in their own boat,” he cried. “They're coming in in their
own boat!”
“There she rides--there she rides!” added Sea Andrew, almost
immediately, and he pointed to the south.
Quite close in, just outside the line of breakers, a black shadow was
rising and falling on the water. It seemed to make scarcely any way at
all, and each sea that curled underneath the boat and roared toward the
beach was a new danger.
“They're going to run her in here,” said Sea Andrew. “There's more left
on board; that's what that means, and they're goin' back for 'em. If
'twasn't so they'd run in anywheres and let her break.”
For one sailor will always tell what another is about, however great the
distance intervening.
Slowly the boat came on, rolling tremendously on the curve of the
breakers, between the broken water of the tideway and the spume of the
surf.
“That's Loo at the hellum,” said Sea Andrew--the keenest eyes in
Farlingford.
And suddenly Miriam swayed sideways against John Turner, who was perhaps
watching her, for he gripped her arm and stood firm. No one spoke. The
watchers on the beach stared open-mouthed, making unconscious grimaces
as the boat rose and fell. All had been ready for some minutes; every
preparation made according to the time-honoured use of these coasts:
four men with life-lines round them standing knee-deep waiting to dash
in deeper, others behind them grouped in two files, some holding the
slack of the life-lines, forming a double rank from the shore to the
fire, giving the steersman his course. There was no need to wave a
torch or shout an order. They were Farlingford men on the shore and
Farlingford men in the boat.
At last, after breathless moments of suspense, the boat turned, and came
spinning in on the top of a breaker, with the useless oars sticking out
like the legs of some huge insect. For a few seconds it was impossible
to distinguish anything. The moment the boat touched ground, the waves
beating on it enveloped all near it in a whirl of spray, and the black
forms seemed to be tumbling over each other in confusion.
“You see,” said Turner to Miriam, “he has come back to you after all.”
She did not answer but stood, her two hands clasped together on her
breast, seeking to disentangle the confused group, half in half out of
the water.
Then they heard Loo Barebone's voice, cheerful and energetic, almost
laughing. Before they could understand what was taking place his voice
was audible again, giving a sharp, clear order, and all the black forms
rushed together down into the surf. A moment later the boat danced out
over the crest of a breaker, splashing into the next and throwing up a
fan of spray.
“She's through, she's through!” cried some one. And the boat rode for a
brief minute head to wind before she turned southward. There were only
three on the thwarts--Loo Barebone and two others.
The group now broke up and straggled up toward the fire. One man
was being supported, and could scarcely walk. It was Captain Clubbe,
hatless, his grey hair plastered across his head by salt water.
He did not heed any one, but sat down heavily on the shingle and felt
his leg with one hand, the other arm hung limply.
“Leave me here,” he said, gruffly, to two or three who were spreading
out a horse-cloth and preparing to carry him. “Here I stay till all are
ashore.”
Behind him were several new-comers, one of them a little man talking
excitedly to his companion.
“But it is a folly,” he was saying in French, “to go back in such a sea
as that.”
It was the Marquis de Gemosac, and no one was taking any notice of
him. Dormer Colville, stumbling over the shingle beside him, recognised
Miriam in the firelight and turned again to look at her companion as if
scarcely believing the evidence of his own eyes.
“Is that you, Turner?” he said. “We are all here,--the Marquis,
Barebone, and I. Clubbe took us on board one dark night in the Gironde
and brought us home.”
“Are you hurt?” asked Turner, curtly.
“Oh, no. But Clubbe's collar-bone is broken and his leg is crushed. We
had to leave four on board; not room for them in the boat. That fool
Barebone has gone back for them. He promised them he would. The sea out
there is awful!”
He knelt down and held his shaking hands to the flames. Some one handed
him a bottle, but he turned first and gave it the Marquis de Gemosac,
who was shaking all over like one far gone in a palsy.
Sea Andrew and the coast-guard captain were persuading Captain Clubbe to
quit the beach, but he only answered them roughly in monosyllables.
“My place is here till all are safe,” he said. “Let me lie.”
And with a groan of pain he lay back on the beach. Miriam folded a
blanket and placed it under his head. He looked round, recognised her
and nodded.
“No place for you, miss,” he said, and closed his eyes. After a moment
he raised himself on his elbow and looked into the faces peering down at
him.
“Loo will beach her anywhere he can. Keep a bright lookout for him,” he
said. Then he was silent, and all turned their faces toward the sea.
Another snow-squall swept in with a rush from the eastward, and half
of the fire was blown away--a trail of sparks hissing on the snow. They
built up the fire again and waited, crouching low over the embers. They
could see nothing out to sea. There was nothing to be done but to
wait. Some had gone along the shore to the south, keeping pace with
the supposed progress of the boat, ready to help should she be thrown
ashore.
Suddenly the Marquis de Gemosac, shivering over the fire, raised his
voice querulously. His emotions always found vent in speech.
“It is a folly,” he repeated, “that he has committed. I do not
understand, gentlemen, how he was permitted to do such a thing--he whose
life is of value to millions.”
He turned his head to glance sharply at Captain Clubbe, at Colville,
at Turner, who listened with that half-contemptuous silence which
Englishmen oppose to unnecessary or inopportune speech.
“Ah!” he said, “you do not understand--you Englishmen--or you do not
believe, perhaps, that he is the King. You would demand proofs which you
know cannot be produced. I demand no proofs, for I know. I know without
any proof at all but his face, his manner, his whole being. I knew at
once when I saw him step out of his boat here in this sad village, and
I have lived with him almost daily ever since--only to be more sure than
at first.”
His hearers made no answer. They listened tolerantly enough, as one
listens to a child or to any other incapable of keeping to the business
in hand.
“Oh, I know more than you suspect,” said the Marquis, suddenly. “There
are some even in our own party who have doubts, who are not quite sure.
I know that there was a doubt as to that portrait of the Queen,” he half
glanced toward Dormer Colville. “Some say one thing, some another.
I have been told that, when the child--Monsieur de Bourbon's
father--landed here, there were two portraits among his few
possessions--the miniature and a larger print, an engraving. Where is
that engraving, one would ask?”
“I have it in my safe in Paris,” said a thick voice in the darkness.
“Thought it was better in my possession than anywhere else.”
“Indeed! And now, Monsieur Turner--” the Marquis raised himself on his
knees and pointed in his eager way a thin finger in the direction of
the banker--“tell me this. Those portraits to which some would attach
importance--they are of the Duchess de Guiche. Admitted? Good! If you
yourself--who have the reputation of being a man of wit--desired to
secure the escape of a child and his nurse, would you content yourself
with the mere precaution of concealing the child's identity? Would
you not go farther and provide the nurse with a subterfuge, a blind,
something for the woman to produce and say, 'This is not the little
Dauphin. This is so-and-so. See, here is the portrait of his mother?'
What so effective, I ask you? What so likely to be believed as a scandal
directed against the hated aristocrats? Can you advance anything against
that theory?”
“No, Monsieur,” replied Turner.
“But Monsieur de Bourbon knows of these doubts,” went on the Marquis.
“They have even touched his own mind, I know that. But he has continued
to fight undaunted. He has made sacrifices--any looking at his face
can see that. It was not in France that he looked for happiness, but
elsewhere. He was not heart-whole--I who have seen him with the most
beautiful women in France paying court to him know that. But this
sacrifice, also, he made for the sake of France. Or perhaps some woman
of whom we know nothing stepped back and bade him go forward alone, for
the sake of his own greatness--who can tell?”
Again no one answered him. He had not perceived Miriam, and John Turner,
with that light step which sometimes goes with a vast bulk, had placed
himself between her and the firelight. Monsieur de Gemosac rose to his
feet and stood looking seaward. The snow-clouds were rolling away to the
west, and the moon, breaking through, was beginning to illumine the wild
sky.
“Gentlemen,” said the Marquis, “they have been gone a long time?”
Captain Clubbe moved restlessly, but he made no answer. The Marquis
had, of course, spoken in French, and the Captain had no use for that
language.
The group round the fire had dwindled until only half a dozen remained.
One after another the watchers had moved away uneasily toward the beach.
The Marquis was right--the boat had been gone too long.
At last the moon broke through, and the snowy scene was almost as light
as day.
John Turner was looking along the beach to the south, and one after
another the watchers by the fire turned their anxious eyes in the same
direction. The sea, whipped white, was bare of any wreck. “The Last
Hope” of Farlingford was gone. She had broken up or rolled into deep
water.
A number of men were coming up the shingle in silence. Sea Andrew,
dragging his feet wearily, approached in advance of them.
“Boat's thrown up on the beach,” he said to Captain Clubbe. “Stove in by
a sea. We've found them.”
He stood back and the others, coming slowly into the light, deposited
their burdens side by side near the fire. The Marquis, who had
understood nothing, took a torch from the hand of a bystander and held
it down toward the face of the man they had brought last.
It was Loo Barebone, and the clean-cut, royal features seemed to wear a
reflective smile.
Miriam had come forward toward the fire, and by chance or by some vague
instinct the bearers had laid their burden at her feet. After all, as
John Turner had said, Loo Barebone had come back to her. She had denied
him twice, and the third time he would take no denial. The taciturn
sailors laid him there and stepped back--as if he was hers and this was
the inevitable end of his short and stormy voyage.
She looked down at him with tired eyes. She had done the right, and
this was the end. There are some who may say that she had done what she
thought was right, and this only seemed to be the end. It may be so.
The Marquis de Gemosac was dumb for once. He looked round him with a
half-defiant question in his eyes. Then he pointed a lean finger down
toward the dead man's face.
“Others may question,” he said, “but I know--I KNOW.”