



Produced by Les Bowler








THE LAST HOPE


By Henry Seton Merriman


     "What is it thou knowest, sweet voice?" I cried.
     "A hidden hope," the voice replied.



CONTENTS

     I.        LE ROI EST MORT
     II.       VIVE LE ROI
     III.      THE RETURN OF "THE LAST HOPE"
     IV.       THE MARQUIS'S CREED
     V.        ON THE <DW18>
     VI.       THE STORY OF THE CASTAWAYS
     VII.      ON THE SCENT
     VIII.     THE LITTLE BOY WHO WAS A KING
     IX.       A MISTAKE
     X.        IN THE ITALIAN HOUSE
     XI.       A BEGINNING
     XII.      THE SECRET OF GEMOSAC
     XIII.     WITHIN THE GATES
     XIV.      THE LIFTED VEIL
     XV.       THE TURN OF THE TIDE
     XVI.      THE GAMBLERS
     XVII.     ON THE PONT ROYAL
     XVIII.    THE CITY THAT SOON FORGETS
     XIX.      IN THE BREACH
     XX.       "NINETEEN"
     XXI.      NO. 8 RUELLE ST. JACOB
     XXII.     DROPPING THE PILOT
     XXIII.    A SIMPLE BANKER
     XXIV.     THE LANE OF MANY TURNINGS
     XXV.      SANS RANCUNE
     XXVI.     RETURNED EMPTY
     XXVII.    OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF BABES
     XXVIII.   BAREBONE'S PRICE
     XXIX.     IN THE DARK
     XXX.      IN THE FURROW AGAIN
     XXXI.     THE THURSDAY OF MADAME DE CHANTONNAY
     XXXII.    PRIMROSES
     XXXIII.   DORMER COLVILLE IS BLIND
     XXXIV.    A SORDID MATTER
     XXXV.     A SQUARE MAN
     XXXVI.    MRS. ST. PIERRE LAWRENCE DOES NOT UNDERSTAND
     XXXVII.   AN UNDERSTANDING
     XXXVIII.  A COUP-D'ETAT
     XXXIX.    "JOHN DARBY"
     XL.       FARLINGFORD ONCE MORE




CHAPTER I. LE ROI EST MORT



"There; that's it. That's where they buried Frenchman," said
Andrew--known as River Andrew. For there was another Andrew who earned
his living on the sea.

River Andrew had conducted the two gentlemen from "The Black Sailor" to
the churchyard by their own request. A message had been sent to him in
the morning that this service would be required of him, to which he had
returned the answer that they would have to wait until the evening. It
was his day to go round Marshford way with dried fish, he said; but in
the evening they could see the church if they still set their minds on
it.

River Andrew combined the light duties of grave-digger and clerk to the
parish of Farlingford in Suffolk with a small but steady business in
fish of his own drying, nets of his own netting, and pork slain and
dressed by his own weather-beaten hands.

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 not our business to inquire why River Andrew had
never used the fickle element. All that lay in the past. And in a degree
he was saved from the disgrace of being a landsman by the smell of tar
and bloaters that heralded his coming, by the blue jersey and the brown
homespun trousers which he wore all the week, and by the saving word
which distinguished him from the poor inland lubbers who had no dealings
with water at all.

He had this evening laid aside his old sou'wester--worn in fair and foul
weather alike--for his Sunday hat. His head-part was therefore official
and lent additional value to the words recorded. He spoke them,
moreover, with a dim note of aggressiveness which might only have been
racy of a soil breeding men who are curt and clear of speech. But there
was more than an East Anglian bluffness in the statement and the manner
of its delivery, as his next 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 <DW72> 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 seeking one that should be distinguished, if only
by the evidence of a little care at the hands of the living. He looked
down the wide grass-grown street--partly paved after the manner of the
Netherlands--toward the quay, where the brown river gleamed between the
walls of the weather-beaten brick buildings. There was a ship lying
at the wharf, half laden with hay; a coasting craft from some of the
greater tidal rivers, the Orwell or the Blackwater. A man was sitting on
a piece of timber on the quay, smoking as he looked seaward. But there
was no one else in sight. For Farlingford was half depopulated, and
it was tea-time. Across the river lay the marshes, unbroken by tree or
hedge, barren of even so much as a hut. In the distance, hazy and grey
in the eye of the North Sea, a lighthouse stood dimly, like a pillar
of smoke. To the south--so far as the eye could pierce the sea
haze--marshes. To the north--where the river ran between bare
<DW18>s--marshes.

And withal a silence which was only intensified by the steady hum of the
wind through the gnarled branches of the few churchyard trees which turn
a crouching back toward the ocean.

In all the world--save, perhaps, in the Arctic world--it would be hard
to find a picture emphasising more clearly the fact that a man's life is
but a small matter, and the memory of it like the seed of grass upon the
wind to be blown away and no more recalled.

The bearer of one of the great names of France stood knee-deep in the
sun-tanned grass and looked slowly round as if seeking to imprint the
scene upon his memory. He turned to glance at the crumbling church
behind him, built long ago by men speaking the language in which his own
thoughts found shape. He looked slowly from end to end of the ill-kept
burial ground, crowded with the bones of the nameless and insignificant
dead, who, after a life passed in the daily struggle to wrest a
sufficiency of food from a barren soil, or the greater struggle to hold
their own against a greedy sea, had faded from the memory of the living,
leaving naught behind them but a little mound where the butcher put his
sheep to graze.

Monsieur de Gemosac was so absorbed in his reflections that he seemed to
forget his surroundings and stood above the grave, pointed out to him by
River Andrew, oblivious to the cold wind that blew in from the sea, deaf
to the clink of the sexton's inviting keys, forgetful of his companion
who stood patiently waiting within the porch. The Marquis was a little
bent man, spare of limb, heavy of shoulder, with snow-white hair against
which his skin, brown and wrinkled as a walnut shell, looked sallow like
old ivory. His face was small and aquiline; not the face of a clever
man, but clearly the face of an aristocrat. He had the grand manner too,
and that quiet air of self-absorption which usually envelops the bearers
of historic names.

Dormer Colville watched him with a good-natured patience which pointed,
as clearly as his attitude and yawning indifference, to the fact that he
was not at Farlingford for his own amusement.

Presently he lounged back again toward the Marquis and stood behind him.

"The wind is cold, Marquis," he said, pleasantly. "One of the coldest
spots in England. What would Mademoiselle say if I allowed you to take a
chill?"

De Gemosac turned and looked at him over his shoulder with a smile full
of pathetic meaning.