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 slain1 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 proximity2 an insatiable appetite for sausages and pork. On these coasts the killing3 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 fickle4 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 tar5 and bloaters that heralded6 his coming, by the blue jersey7 and the brown homespun trousers which he wore all the week, and by the saving word which distinguished8 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 foul9 weather alike—for his Sunday hat. His head-part was therefore official and lent additional value to the words recorded. He spoke10 them, moreover, with a dim note of aggressiveness which might only have been racy of a soil breeding men who are curt11 and clear of speech. But there was more than an East Anglian bluffness12 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 crumbling13 grave which had never been distinguished by a headstone. The grass grew high all over Farlingford churchyard, almost hiding the mounds14 where the forefathers16 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 gist17 of them into French for the information of his senior, a little white-haired gentleman whom he called “Monsieur le Marquis.”
He spoke glibly18 enough in either tongue, with a certain indifference19 of manner. This was essentially20 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 mouldering21 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 musingly22 across the marshes23 toward the distant sea. For River Andrew, like many hawkers of cheap wares24, knew the indirect commercial value of news.
The little white-haired Frenchman made a gesture of the shoulders and outspread hands indicative of a pious25 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 mound15 had sunk, and suggestive hollows were visible in the grass.
“First, it's the coffin26 that bu'sts in beneath the weight, then it's the bones,” he added, with that grim realism which is begotten27 of familiarity.
Dormer Colville did not trouble to translate these general truths. He suppressed a yawn as he contemplated28 the tottering29 headstones of certain master-mariners and Trinity-pilots taking their long rest in the immediate30 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 silted31 up, a commerce absorbed by a more prosperous neighbour nearer to the railway.
Below the churchyard was the wide street which took a turn eastward32 at the gates and led straight down to the river-side. Farlingford Quay33—a little colony of warehouses34 and tarred huts—was separated from Farlingford proper by a green, where the water glistened35 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 manor36 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 artistic37; for he studied the Norman work with the eye of a connoisseur38. He was evidently a cultured man, more interested in a work of art than in human story.
River Andrew, seeing him depart, jingled39 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 wharf40, half laden41 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, hazy42 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 dykes43—marshes.
And withal a silence which was only intensified44 by the steady hum of the wind through the gnarled branches of the few churchyard trees which turn a crouching45 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 imprint46 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 insignificant47 dead, who, after a life passed in the daily struggle to wrest48 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 naught49 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, pointed50 out to him by River Andrew, oblivious51 to the cold wind that blew in from the sea, deaf to the clink of the sexton's inviting52 keys, forgetful of his companion who stood patiently waiting within the porch. The Marquis was a little bent53 man, spare of limb, heavy of shoulder, with snow-white hair against which his skin, brown and wrinkled as a walnut54 shell, looked sallow like old ivory. His face was small and aquiline55; not the face of a clever man, but clearly the face of an aristocrat56. He had the grand manner too, and that quiet air of self-absorption which usually envelops57 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. He spread out his arms in a gesture indicative of horror at the bleakness58 of the surroundings; at the mournfulness of the decaying village; the dreary59 hopelessness of the mouldering church and tombs.
“I was thinking, my friend,” he said. “That was all. It is not surprising... that one should think.”
Colville heaved a sigh and said nothing. He was, it seemed, essentially a sympathetic man; not of a thoughtful habit himself, but tolerant of thought in others. It was abominably60 windy and cold, although the corn was beginning to ripen61; but he did not complain. Neither did he desire to hurry his companion in any way.
He looked at the crumbling grave with a passing shadow in his clever and worldly eyes, and composed himself to await his friend's pleasure.
In his way he must have been a philosopher. His attitude did not suggest that he was bored, and yet it was obvious that he was eminently62 out of place in this remote spot. He had nothing in common, for instance, with River Andrew, and politely yawned that reminiscent fish-curer into silence. His very clothes were of a cut and fashion never before seen in Farlingford. He wore them, too, with an air rarely assumed even in the streets of Ipswich.
Men still dressed with care at this time; for d'Orsay was not yet dead, though his fame was tarnished63. Mr. Dormer Colville was not a dandy, however. He was too clever to go to that extreme and too wise not to be within reach of it in an age when great tailors were great men, and it was quite easy to make a reputation by clothes alone.
Not only was his dress too fine for Farlingford, but his personality was not in tune64 with this forgotten end of England. His movements were too quick for a slow-moving race of men; no fools, and wiser than their midland brethren; slow because they had yet to make sure that a better way of life had been discovered than that way in which their Saxon forefathers had always walked.
Colville seemed to look at the world with an exploiting eye. He had a speculative65 mind. Had he lived at the end of the Victorian era instead of the beginning he might have been a notable financier. His quick glance took in all Farlingford in one comprehensive verdict. There was nothing to be made of it. It was uninteresting because it obviously had no future, nor encouraged any enterprise. He looked across the marshes indifferently, following the line of the river as it made its devious66 way between high dykes to the sea. And suddenly his eye lighted. There was a sail to the south. A schooner67 was standing68 in to the river mouth, her sails glowing rosily69 in the last of the sunset light.
Colville turned to see whether River Andrew had noticed, and saw that landsman looking skyward with an eye that seemed to foretell70 the early demise71 of a favouring wind.
“That's 'The Last Hope,'” he said, in answer to Dormer Colville's question. “And it will take all Seth Clubbe's seamanship to save the tide. '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 is not the end,” answered Colville, cheerfully. “It is only the end of a chapter. Le roi est mort—vive le roi!”
He pointed with his stick, as he spoke, to the schooner creeping in between the dykes.
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1
slain
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| 杀死，宰杀，杀戮( slay的过去分词 )； (slay的过去分词) | |
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proximity
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| n.接近，邻近 | |
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killing
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| n.巨额利润；突然赚大钱，发大财 | |
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fickle
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| adj.(爱情或友谊上)易变的，不坚定的 | |
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tar
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| n.柏油，焦油；vt.涂或浇柏油/焦油于 | |
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6
heralded
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| v.预示( herald的过去式和过去分词 )；宣布（好或重要） | |
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7
jersey
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| n.运动衫 | |
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8
distinguished
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| adj.卓越的，杰出的，著名的 | |
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9
foul
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| adj.污秽的；邪恶的；v.弄脏；妨害；犯规；n.犯规 | |
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10
spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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11
curt
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| adj.简短的，草率的 | |
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bluffness
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| 率直，坦率，直峭 | |
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13
crumbling
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| adj.摇摇欲坠的 | |
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14
mounds
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| 土堆，土丘( mound的名词复数 )； 一大堆 | |
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15
mound
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| n.土墩，堤，小山；v.筑堤，用土堆防卫 | |
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16
forefathers
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| n.祖先，先人；祖先，祖宗( forefather的名词复数 )；列祖列宗；前人 | |
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17
gist
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| n.要旨；梗概 | |
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18
glibly
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| adv.流利地，流畅地；满口 | |
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19
indifference
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| n.不感兴趣，不关心，冷淡，不在乎 | |
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20
essentially
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| adv.本质上，实质上，基本上 | |
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21
mouldering
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| v.腐朽( moulder的现在分词 )；腐烂，崩塌 | |
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22
musingly
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| adv.沉思地，冥想地 | |
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marshes
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| n.沼泽，湿地( marsh的名词复数 ) | |
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24
wares
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| n. 货物, 商品 | |
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25
pious
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| adj.虔诚的；道貌岸然的 | |
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coffin
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| n.棺材，灵柩 | |
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27
begotten
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| v.为…之生父( beget的过去分词 )；产生，引起 | |
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28
contemplated
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| adj. 预期的 动词contemplate的过去分词形式 | |
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29
tottering
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| adj.蹒跚的，动摇的v.走得或动得不稳( totter的现在分词 )；踉跄；蹒跚；摇摇欲坠 | |
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30
immediate
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| adj.立即的；直接的，最接近的；紧靠的 | |
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31
silted
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| v.（河流等）为淤泥淤塞( silt的过去式和过去分词 )；（使）淤塞 | |
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32
eastward
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| adv.向东；adj.向东的；n.东方，东部 | |
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quay
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| n.码头，靠岸处 | |
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warehouses
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| 仓库，货栈( warehouse的名词复数 ) | |
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35
glistened
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| v.湿物闪耀，闪亮( glisten的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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manor
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| n.庄园，领地 | |
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artistic
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| adj.艺术(家)的，美术(家)的；善于艺术创作的 | |
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38
connoisseur
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| n.鉴赏家，行家，内行 | |
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39
jingled
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| 喝醉的 | |
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40
wharf
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| n.码头，停泊处 | |
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41
laden
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| adj.装满了的；充满了的；负了重担的；苦恼的 | |
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42
hazy
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| adj.有薄雾的，朦胧的；不肯定的，模糊的 | |
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43
dykes
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| abbr.diagonal wire cutters 斜线切割机n.堤( dyke的名词复数 )；坝；堰；沟 | |
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44
intensified
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| v.（使）增强， （使）加剧( intensify的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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45
crouching
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| v.屈膝，蹲伏( crouch的现在分词 ) | |
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46
imprint
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| n.印痕，痕迹；深刻的印象；vt.压印，牢记 | |
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47
insignificant
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| adj.无关紧要的，可忽略的，无意义的 | |
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48
wrest
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| n.扭，拧，猛夺；v.夺取，猛扭，歪曲 | |
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49
naught
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| n.无，零 [=nought] | |
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50
pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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51
oblivious
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| adj.易忘的，遗忘的，忘却的，健忘的 | |
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52
inviting
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| adj.诱人的，引人注目的 | |
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53
bent
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| n.爱好，癖好；adj.弯的；决心的，一心的 | |
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54
walnut
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| n.胡桃，胡桃木，胡桃色，茶色 | |
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55
aquiline
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| adj.钩状的，鹰的 | |
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56
aristocrat
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| n.贵族，有贵族气派的人，上层人物 | |
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57
envelops
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| v.包围，笼罩，包住( envelop的第三人称单数 ) | |
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58
bleakness
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| adj. 萧瑟的, 严寒的, 阴郁的 | |
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59
dreary
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| adj.令人沮丧的，沉闷的，单调乏味的 | |
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60
abominably
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| adv. 可恶地，可恨地，恶劣地 | |
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61
ripen
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| vt.使成熟；vi.成熟 | |
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eminently
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| adv.突出地；显著地；不寻常地 | |
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63
tarnished
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| （通常指金属）（使）失去光泽，（使）变灰暗( tarnish的过去式和过去分词 )； 玷污，败坏 | |
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64
tune
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| n.调子；和谐，协调；v.调音，调节，调整 | |
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65
speculative
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| adj.思索性的，暝想性的，推理的 | |
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66
devious
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| adj.不坦率的，狡猾的；迂回的，曲折的 | |
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67
schooner
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| n.纵帆船 | |
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68
standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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69
rosily
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| adv.带玫瑰色地，乐观地 | |
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70
foretell
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| v.预言，预告，预示 | |
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71
demise
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| n.死亡；v.让渡，遗赠，转让 | |
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