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Updated: June 9, 2025
His new self that phantom second-nature bred of custom vanished in the twinkling of an eye, and left him plain Loo Barebone, of Farlingford, staring across the green water toward "The Last Hope," deep-laden, anchored in mid-stream. Seeing him stop, a boatman ran toward him from a neighbouring flight of steps. "An English ship, monsieur," he said; "just come in. Her anchors are hardly home.
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.
Which was untrue; for River Andrew knew no more than the rest of Farlingford of a man who, having been literally cast up by the sea at their gates, had lived his life within those gates, had married a Farlingford woman, and had at last gone the way of all Farlingford without telling any who or what he was.
"You think that I forget that he is my relative," said Loo, sharply, detecting in his quickness of thought a passing resentment. "I do not. I never forget that. I am the son of his cousin. I know that, and thus related to many in Farlingford. But I have never called him cousin, and he has never asked me to."
"Passen takes no account o' churchyard," River Andrew had said, and neither he nor any other in Farlingford could account for the special neglect to which was abandoned that particular corner of the burial ground where the late Mrs. Marvin reposed beneath an early Victorian headstone of singular hideousness. Mr. Marvin always went round the other way.
For Captain Clubbe had not laid aside in his travels a certain East Anglian distrust of the unknown. He had, of course, noted the presence of the strangers when he landed at Farlingford quay, but his large, immobile face had betrayed no peculiar interest. There had been plenty to tell him all that was known of Monsieur de Gemosac and Dormer Colville, and a good deal that was only surmised.
Colville and Monsieur de Gemosac were on the quay in the afternoon at high tide when "The Last Hope" was warped on to the slip-way. All Farlingford was there too, and Captain Clubbe carried out the difficult task with hardly any words at all from a corner of the jetty, with Loo Barebone on board as second in command.
For Farlingford lies in that part of England which reaches seaward toward the Fatherland, and seems to have acquired from that proximity an insatiable appetite for sausages and pork. On these coasts the killing of pigs and the manufacture of sausages would appear to employ the leisure of the few, who for one reason or another have been deemed unfit for the sea.
It is to be supposed that he was sitting down to the task he had set himself to forget Farlingford. There was a great reception at the Hotel Gemosac that night, and after twenty years of brooding silence the rooms, hastily set in order, were lighted up. There was, as the Marquis had promised, no man or woman present who was not vouched for by a noble name or by history.
Or was it fate? So often is the natural nothing but the inevitable in holiday garb. "That is no Farlingford boat," said Sep, versed in riverside knowledge, so soon as he saw the balance-lug moving along the line of the river-wall, half a mile below the village. They stood watching. Few coasters were at sea in these months of wild weather, and there was nothing moving on the quay.
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