He had been induced to make this journey thus, in the evening of his days, by the Hope, hitherto vain enough, which many Frenchmen had pursued for half a century. For he was one of those who refused to believe that Louis XVII had died in the prison of the Temple.
Not once, but many times, Dormer Colville laughingly denied any responsibility in the matter.
“I will not even tell the story as it was told to me,” he said to the Marquis de Gemosac, to the Abbé Touvent and to the Comtesse de Chantonnay, whom he met frequently enough at the house of his cousin, Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence, in that which is now the Province of the Charente Inférieure. “I will not even tell you the story as it was told to me, until one of you has seen the man. And then, if you ask me, I will tell you. It is nothing to me, you understand. I am no dreamer, but a very material person, who lives in France because he loves the sunshine, and the cuisine, and the good, kind hearts, which no government or want of government can deteriorate.”
And Madame de Chantonnay, who liked Dormer Colville—with whom she admitted she always felt herself in sympathy—smiled graciously in response to his gallant bow. For she, too, was a materialist who loved the sunshine and the cuisine; more especially the cuisine.
Moreover, Colville never persuaded the Marquis de Gemosac to come to England. He went so far as to represent, in a realistic light, the discomforts of the journey, and only at the earnest desire of many persons concerned did he at length enter into the matter and good-naturedly undertake to accompany the aged traveller.
So far as his story was concerned, he kept his word, entertaining the Marquis on the journey and during their two days’ sojourn at the humble inn at Farlingford with that flow of sympathetic and easy conversation which always made Madame de Chantonnay protest that he was no Englishman at all, but all that there was of the most French. Has it not been seen that Colville refused to translate the dark sayings of River Andrew by the side of the grass-grown grave, which seemed to have been brought to the notice of the travellers by the merest accident?
“I promised you that I should tell you nothing until you had seen him,” he repeated, as the Marquis followed with his eyes the movements of the group of which the man they called Loo Barebone formed the centre.
No one took much notice of the two strangers. It is not considered good manners in a seafaring community to appear to notice a new-comer. Captain Clubbe was naturally the object of universal attention. Was he not bringing foreign money into Farlingford, where the local purses needed replenishing now that trade had fallen away and agriculture was so sorely hampered by the lack of roads across the marsh?
Clubbe pushed his way through the crowd to shake hands with the Rev. Septimus Marvin, who seemed to emerge from a visionary world of his own in order to perform that ceremony and to return thither on its completion.
Then the majority of the onlookers straggled homeward, leaving a few wives and sweethearts waiting by the steps, with patient eyes fixed on the spidery figures in the rigging of “The Last Hope.” Dormer Colville and the Marquis de Gemosac were left alone, while the rector stood a few yards away, glaring abstractedly at them through his gold-rimmed spectacles as if they had been some strange flotsam cast up by the high tide.