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Updated: June 9, 2025
Some dark night, he had thought, on the Dogger, he would slip overboard and take his chance. He had never looked for thick weather at this time of year off the Banks, so near home, within a few hours' sail of the mouth of Farlingford River. If a breeze would only come up from the south-east, as it almost always does in these waters toward the evening of a still, fine day!
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.
'The Last Hope. There's many a 'Hope, built at Farlingford, and that's the last, for the yard is closed and there's no more building now." The Marquis de Gemosac had turned away from the grave, but as Colville approached him he looked back to it with a shake of the head. "After eight centuries of splendour, my friend," he said. "Can that be the end that?"
It was equally characteristic of a Farlingford ship that there were no greetings from the deck. Those on shore could clearly perceive the burly form of Captain Clubbe, standing by the weather rigging. Wives could distinguish their husbands, and girls their lovers; but, as these were attending to their business with a taciturn concentration, no hand was raised in salutation.
She seemed to take it for granted that he should have seen them, though he had not appeared to look in their direction. "Oh yes. I saw them, but I do not know who they are. I came straight here as soon as I could." "One of them is a Frenchman," she said, taking no heed of the excuse given for his ignorance of Farlingford news. "The old man I thought so. I felt it when I looked at him.
Some prescient females went so far as to state that they could see quite distinctly in the elder gentleman's demeanour a sense of comfort and consolation at the knowledge thus tactfully conveyed to him that he was not the first of his kind to be seen in Farlingford.
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.
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.
"Skipper was a Farlingford man, name of Doy," he continued. "Long as he lived he was pestered by inquiries from the French government respecting a Dieppe fishing-smack supposed to have been picked up abandoned at sea. He had picked up no fishing-smack, and he answered no letters about it. He was an old man when it happened, and he died at sea soon after my indentures expired.
He was an absent-minded man, but he always remembered, as River Andrew himself admitted, to go north about. And his wife's grave was overgrown by salted grass as were the rest. Farlingford had accepted him, when his College, having no use for such a dreamer elsewhere, gave him the living, not only with resignation, but with equanimity.
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