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.
Parson Marvin knew none of these things, however; nor suspected that the advance of civilisation is not always progressive, but that she may take hands with vulgarity and dance down-hill, as she does to-day. His one scheme of life for Sep was that he should be sent to the ancient school where field-sports are cultivated to-day and English gentlemen turned upon the world more ignorant than any other gentlemen in the universe. Then, of course, Sep must go to that College with which his father's life had been so closely allied. And if it please God to call him to the Church, and the College should remember that it had given his father a living, and do the same by him—for that reason and no other—then, of course, Sep would be a made man.
And the making of Sep had been in progress during the winter day that a fog-bank came in from the North Sea and clung tenaciously to the low, surfless coast. In the afternoon the sun broke through at last, wintry and pale. Sep, who, by some instinct—the instinct, it is to be supposed, of young animals—knew that he was destined to be of a generation that should cultivate ignorance out of doors, rather than learning by the fireside, threw aside his books and cried out that he could no longer breathe in his father's study.
So Paid Marvin went off, alone, to visit a distant parishioner—one who was dying by himself out on the marsh, in a cottage cut off from all the world in a spring tide.
“Don't forget that it is high tide at five o'clock, and that there is no moon, and that the dykes will be full. You will never find your way across the marsh after dark,” said Sep—the learned in tides and those practical affairs of nature, which were as a closed book to the scholar.
Parson Marvin vaguely acknowledged the warning and went away, leaving Sep to accompany Miriam on her daily errand to the simple shops in Farlingford, which would awake to life and business now that the sea-fog was gone. For the men of Farlingford, like nearly all seafarers, are timorous of bad weather on shore and sit indoors during its passage, while they treat storm and rain with a calm contempt at sea.
“Sail a-coming up the river, master,” River Andrew said to Sep, who was awaiting Miriam in the village street, and he walked on, without further comment, spade on shoulder, toward the church-yard, where he spent a portion of his day, without apparent effect.
So, when Miriam had done her shopping, it was only natural that they should turn their footsteps toward the quay and the river-wall. 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. The moss-grown slip-way, where “The Last Hope” had been drawn up for repair, stood gaunt and empty, half submerged by the flowing tide. Many Farlingford men were engaged in the winter fisheries on the Dogger, and farther north, in Lowestoft boats. In winter, Farlingford—thrust out into the North Sea, surrounded by marsh—is forgotten by the world.
The solitary boat came round the corner into the wider sheet of water, locally known as Quay Reach.
“A foreigner!” cried Sep, jumping, as was his wont, from one foot to the other with excitement. “It is like the boat that was brought up by the tide, with a dead man in it, long ago. And that was a Belgian boat.”
Miriam was looking at the boat with a sudden brightness in her eyes, a rush of colour to her cheeks, which were round and healthy and of that soft clear pink which marks a face swept constantly by mist and a salty air. In flat countries, where men may see each other, unimpeded by hedge or tree or hillock, across a space measured only by miles, the eye is soon trained—like the sailor's eye—to see and recognise at a great distance.
There was no mistaking the attitude of the solitary steersman of this foreign boat stealing quietly up to Farlingford on the flood tide. It was Loo Barebone sitting on the gunwale as he always sat, with one knee raised on the thwart, to support his elbow, and his chin in the palm of his hand, so that he could glance up the head of the sail or ahead, without needing to change his position.
Sep turned and looked up at her.
“I thought you said he was never coming back,” he said, reproachfully.
“So I did. I thought he was never coming back.”
Sep looked at her again, and then at the boat. One never knows how much children, and dogs—who live daily with human beings—understand.
“Your face is very red,” he observed. “That comes from telling untruths.”
“It comes from the cold wind,” replied Miriam, with an odd, breathless lau............