There was another chance. The “Petite Jeanne” was drawing six feet; the dinghy could sail across a shoal covered by eighteen inches of water. But such a shoal would be clearly visible on the surface of the water. Besides, there was no shallow like that nearer than the Goodwins. Barebone pressed out seaward. He knew every channel and every bank between the Thames and Thorpeness. He kept on pressing out to sea by short tacks. All the while he was peeping over the gunwale out of the corner of his eye. He was near, he must be near, a bank covered by five feet of water at low tide. A shoal of five feet is rarely visible on the surface.
Suddenly he rose from his seat on the gunwale, and stood with the tiller in one hand and the sheet in the other, half turning back to look at “Petite Jeanne” towering almost over him. And as he looked, her bluff black bows rose upward with an odd climbing movement like a horse stepping up a bank. With a rattle of ropes and blocks she stood still.
Barebone went about again and sailed past her.
“Sans rancune!” he shouted. But no one heeded him, for they had other matters to attend to. And the dinghy sailed into the veil of the mist toward the land.
CHAPTER XXVI — RETURNED EMPTY
The breeze freshened, and, as was to be expected, blew the fog-bank away before sunset.
Sep Marvin had been an unwilling student all day. Like many of his cloth and generation, Parson Marvin pinned all his faith on education. “Give a boy a good education,” he said, a hundred times. “Make a gentleman of him, and you have done your duty by him.”
“Make a gentleman of him—and the world will be glad to feed and clothe him,” was the real thought in his mind, as it was in the mind of nearly all his contemporaries. The wildest dreamer of those days never anticipated that, in the passage of one brief generation, social advancement should be for the shrewdly ignorant rather than for the scholar; that it would be better for a man that his mind be stored with knowledge of the world than the wisdom of the classics; that the successful grocer might find a kinder welcome in a palace than the scholar; that the manufacturer of kitchen utensils might feed with kings and speak to them, without aspirates, between the courses.