The Last Hope | Page 2

observation at once explained.
"Passen thinks it's over there by the yew-tree--but he's wrong. That
there one was a wash-up found by old Willem the lighthouse keeper
one morning early. No! this is where Frenchman was laid by."
He indicated with the toe of his sea-boot a crumbling grave which had
never been distinguished by a headstone. The grass grew high all over
Farlingford churchyard, almost hiding the mounds where the
forefathers slept side by side with the nameless "wash-ups," to whom
they had extended a last hospitality.
River Andrew had addressed his few remarks to the younger of his two
companions, a well-dressed, smartly set-up man of forty or thereabouts,
who in turn translated the gist of them into French for the information
of his senior, a little white-haired gentleman whom he called "Monsieur
le Marquis."
He spoke glibly enough in either tongue, with a certain indifference of
manner. This was essentially a man of cities, and one better suited to
the pavement than the rural quiet of Farlingford. To have the gift of
tongues is no great recommendation to the British born, and River
Andrew looked askance at this fine gentleman while he spoke French.
He had received letters at the post-office under the name of Dormer
Colville: a name not unknown in London and Paris, but of which the
social fame had failed to travel even to Ipswich, twenty miles away
from this mouldering churchyard.
"It's getting on for twenty-five years come Michaelmas," put in River

Andrew. "I wasn't digger then; but I remember the burial well enough.
And I remember Frenchman--same as if I see him yesterday."
He plucked a blade of grass from the grave and placed it between his
teeth.
"He were a mystery, he were," he added, darkly, and turned to look
musingly across the marshes toward the distant sea. For River Andrew,
like many hawkers of cheap wares, knew the indirect commercial value
of news.
The little white-haired Frenchman made a gesture of the shoulders and
outspread hands indicative of a pious horror at the condition of this
neglected grave. The meaning of his attitude was so obvious that River
Andrew shifted uneasily from one foot to the other.
"Passen," he said, "he don't take no account of the graves. He's what
you might call a bookworm. Always a sitting indoors reading books
and pictures. Butcher Franks turns his sheep in from time to time. But
along of these tempests and the hot sun the grass has shot up a bit.
Frenchman's no worse off than others. And there's some as are fallen in
altogether."
He indicated one or two graves where the mound had sunk, and
suggestive hollows were visible in the grass.
"First, it's the coffin that bu'sts in beneath the weight, then it's the
bones," he added, with that grim realism which is begotten of
familiarity.
Dormer Colville did not trouble to translate these general truths. He
suppressed a yawn as he contemplated the tottering headstones of
certain master-mariners and Trinity-pilots taking their long rest in the
immediate vicinity. The churchyard lay on the slope of rising ground
upon which the village of Farlingford straggled upward in one long
street. Farlingford had once been a town of some commercial
prosperity. Its story was the story of half a dozen ports on this coast--a
harbour silted up, a commerce absorbed by a more prosperous

neighbour nearer to the railway.
Below the churchyard was the wide street which took a turn eastward at
the gates and led straight down to the river-side. Farlingford Quay--a
little colony of warehouses and tarred huts--was separated from
Farlingford proper by a green, where the water glistened at high tide. In
olden days the Freemen of Farlingford had been privileged to graze
their horses on the green. In these later times the lord of the manor
pretended to certain rights over the pasturage, which Farlingford, like
one man, denied him.
"A mystery," repeated River Andrew, waiting very clearly for Mr.
Dormer Colville to translate the suggestive word to the French
gentleman. But Colville only yawned. "And there's few in Farlingford
as knew Frenchman as well as I did."
Mr. Colville walked toward the church porch, which seemed to appeal
to his sense of the artistic; for he studied the Norman work with the eye
of a connoisseur. He was evidently a cultured man, more interested in a
work of art than in human story.
River Andrew, seeing him depart, jingled the keys which he carried in
his hand, and glanced impatiently toward the older man. The Marquis
de Gemosac, however, ignored the sound as completely as he had
ignored River Andrew's remarks. He was looking round him with eyes
which had once been dark and bright, and were now dimly yellow. He
looked from tomb to tomb, vainly