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                               THE ROVER

                                  BY
                             JOSEPH CONRAD

    _Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas,
    Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please_
                                         SPENSER


                           THE RYERSON PRESS
                                TORONTO
                                 1923




                       PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN


                                  To

                             G. JEAN AUBRY

                             IN FRIENDSHIP

                    THIS TALE OF THE LAST DAYS OF A

                      FRENCH BROTHER OF THE COAST




                               THE ROVER




I


After entering at break of day the inner roadstead of the Port of
Toulon, exchanging several loud hails with one of the guardboats of the
Fleet, which directed him where he was to take up his berth,
Master-Gunner Peyrol let go the anchor of the sea-worn and battered ship
in his charge, between the arsenal and the town, in full view of the
principal quay. The course of his life, which in the opinion of any
ordinary person might have been regarded as full of marvellous incidents
(only he himself had never marvelled at them) had rendered him
undemonstrative to such a degree, that he did not even let out a sigh of
relief at the rumble of the chain. And yet it ended a most anxious six
months of knocking about at sea with valuable merchandize in a damaged
hull, most of the time on short rations, always on the lookout for
English cruisers, once or twice on the verge of shipwreck and more than
once on the verge of capture. But as to that, old Peyrol had made up his
mind from the first to blow up his valuable charge--unemotionally, for
such was his character, formed under the sun of the Indian seas in
lawless contests with his kind for a little loot that vanished as soon
as grasped, but mainly for bare life almost as precarious to hold
through its ups and downs, and which now had lasted for fifty-eight
years.

While his crew of half-starved scarecrows, hard as nails and ravenous as
so many wolves for the delights of the shore, swarmed aloft to furl the
sails nearly as thin and as patched as the grimy shirts on their backs,
Peyrol took a survey of the quay. Groups were forming along its whole
stretch to gaze at the new arrival. Peyrol noted particularly a good
many men in red caps and said to himself: “Here they are.” Amongst the
crews of ships that had brought the tricolour into the seas of the East,
there were hundreds professing sans-culotte principles; boastful and
declamatory beggars he had thought them. But now he was beholding the
shore breed. Those who had made the Revolution safe. The real thing.
Peyrol after taking a good long look, went below into his cabin to make
himself ready to go ashore.

He shaved his big cheeks with a real English razor, looted years ago
from an officer’s cabin in an English East Indiaman, captured by a ship
he was serving in then. He put on a white shirt, a short blue jacket
with metal buttons and a high roll-collar, a pair of white trousers
which he fastened with a red bandana handkerchief, by way of a belt.
With a black, shiny low-crowned hat on his head he made a very
creditable prize-master. He beckoned from the poop to a boatman and got
himself rowed to the quay.

By that time the crowd had grown to a large size. Peyrol’s eyes ranged
over it with no great apparent interest, though it was a fact that he
had never in all his man’s life seen so many idle white people massed
together to stare at a sailor. He had been a rover of the outer seas;
he had grown into a stranger to his native country. During the few
minutes it took the boatman to row him to the steps, he felt like a
navigator about to land on a newly discovered shore.

On putting his foot on it he was mobbed. The arrival of a prize made by
a squadron of the Republic in distant seas was not an everyday
occurrence in Toulon. The wildest rumours had been already set flying.
Peyrol elbowed himself through the crowd somehow, but it continued to
move after him. A voice cried out, “Where do you come from, citoyen?”
“From the other side of the world,” Peyrol boomed out.

He did not get rid of his followers till the door of the Port Office.
There he reported himself to the proper officials as master of a prize
taken off the Cape by Citoyen Renaud, Commander-in-Chief of the
Republican Squadron in the Indian Seas. He had been ordered to make for
Dunkerque but, said he, having been chased by the sacrés Anglais three
times in a fortnight between Cape Verde and Cape Spartel, he had made up
his mind to run into the Mediterranean where, he had understood from a
Danish brig he had met at sea, there were no English men-of-war just
then. And here he was; and there were his ship’s papers and his own
papers and everything in order. He mentioned also that he was tired of
rolling about the seas, and that he longed for a period of repose on
shore. But till all the legal business was settled he remained in Toulon
roaming about the streets at a deliberate gait, enjoying general
consideration as Citizen Peyrol, and looking everybody coldly in the
eye.

His reticence about his past was of that kind which starts a lot of
mysterious stories about a man. No doubt the maritime authorities of
Toulon had a less cloudy idea of Peyrol’s past, though it need not
necessarily have been more exact. In the various offices connected with
the sea where his duties took him, the wretched scribes, and even some
of the chiefs, looked very hard at him as he went in and out, dressed
very neatly, and always with his cudgel, which he used to leave outside
the door of private offices when called in for an interview with one or
another of the “gold-laced lot.” Having, however, cut off his queue and
got in touch with some prominent patriots of the Jacobin type, Peyrol
cared little for people’s stares and whispers. The person that came
nearest to trying his composure, was a certain naval captain with a
patch over one eye and a very threadbare uniform coat, who was doing
some administrative work at the Port Office. That officer, looking up
from some papers, remarked brusquely, “As a matter of fact you have been
the best part of your life skimming the seas, if the truth were known.
You must have been a deserter from the Navy at one time, whatever you
may call yourself now.”

There was not a quiver on the large cheeks of the gunner Peyrol.

“If there was anything of the sort it was in the time of kings and
aristocrats,” he said steadily. “And now I have brought in a prize, and
a service letter from Citizen Renaud, commanding in the Indian seas. I
can also give you the names of good Republicans in this town who know my
sentiments. Nobody can say I was ever anti-revolutionary in my life. I
knocked about the Eastern seas for forty-five years--that’s true. But
let me observe that it was the seamen who stayed at home that let the
English into the Port of Toulon.” He paused for a moment and then added,
“When one thinks of that, Citoyen Commandant, any little slips I and
fellows of my kind may have made five thousand leagues from here and
twenty years ago cannot have much importance in these times of equality
and fraternity.”

“As to fraternity,” remarked the post-captain in the shabby coat, “the
only one you are familiar with is the brotherhood of the coast, I should
say.”

“Everybody in the Indian Ocean except milksops and youngsters had to
be,” said the untroubled Citizen Peyrol. “And we practised republican
principles long before a republic was thought of; for the Brothers of
the Coast were all equal and elected their own chiefs.”

“They were an abominable lot of lawless ruffians,” remarked the officer
venomously, leaning back in his chair. “You will not dare to deny that.”

Citizen Peyrol refused to take up a defensive attitude. He merely
mentioned in a neutral tone that he had delivered his trust to the Port
Office all right, and as to his character he had a certificate of civism
from his section. He was a patriot and entitled to his discharge. After
being dismissed by a nod he took up his cudgel outside the door and
walked out of the building with the calmness of rectitude. His large
face of the Roman type betrayed nothing to the wretched quill-drivers,
who whispered on his passage. As he went along the streets, he looked as
usual everybody in the eye; but that very same evening he vanished from
Toulon. It wasn’t that he was afraid of anything. His mind was as calm
as the natural set of his florid face. Nobody could know what his forty
years or more of sea life had been, unless he told them himself. And of
that he didn’t mean to tell more than what he had told the inquisitive
captain with the patch over one eye. But he didn’t want any bother for
certain other reasons; and more than anything else he didn’t want to be
sent perhaps to serve in the fleet now fitting out in Toulon. So at dusk
he passed through the gate on the road to Fréjus in a high two-wheeled
cart belonging to a well-known farmer whose habitation lay that way. His
personal belongings were brought down and piled up on the tailboard of
the cart by some ragamuffin patriots whom he engaged in the street for
that purpose. The only indiscretion he committed was to pay them for
their trouble with a large handful of assignats. From such a prosperous
seaman, however, this generosity was not so very compromising. He
himself got into the cart over the wheel, with such slow and ponderous
movements, that the friendly farmer felt called upon to remark: “Ah, we
are not so young as we used to be--you and I.” “I have also an awkward
wound,” said Citizen Peyrol sitting down heavily.

And so from farmer’s cart to farmer’s cart, getting lifts all along,
jogging in a cloud of dust between stone walls and through little
villages well known to him from his boyhood’s days, in a landscape of
stony hills, pale rocks, and dusty green of olive trees, Citizen Peyrol
went on unmolested till he got down clumsily in the yard of an inn on
the outskirts of the town of Hyères. The sun was setting to his right.
Near a clump of dark pines with blood-red trunks in the sunset Peyrol
perceived a rutty track branching off in the direction of the sea.

At that spot Citizen Peyrol had made up his mind to leave the high road.
Every feature of the country with the darkly wooded rises, the barren
flat expanse of stones and sombre bushes to his left, appealed to him
with a sort of strange familiarity, because they had remained unchanged
since the days of his boyhood. The very cartwheel tracks scored deep
into the stony ground had kept their physiognomy; and far away, like a
blue thread, there was the sea of the Hyères roadstead with a lumpy
indigo swelling still beyond--which was the island of Porquerolles. He
had an idea that he had been born on Porquerolles, but he really did not
know. The notion of a father was absent from his mentality. What he
remembered of his parents was a tall, lean, brown woman in rags, who was
his mother. But then they were working together at a farm which was on
the mainland. He had fragmentary memories of her shaking down olives,
picking stones out of a field, or handling a manure fork like a man,
tireless and fierce, with wisps of greyish hair flying about her bony
face; and of himself running barefooted in connection with a flock of
turkeys, with hardly any clothes on his back. At night, by the farmer’s
favour, they were permitted to sleep in a sort of ruinous byre built of
stones and with only half a roof on it, lying side by side on some old
straw on the ground. And it was on a bundle of straw that his mother had
tossed ill for two days and had died in the night. In the darkness, her
silence, her cold face had given him an awful scare. He supposed they
had buried her but he didn’t know, because he had rushed out
terror-struck, and never stopped till he got as far as a little place by
the sea called Almanarre, where he hid himself on board a tartane that
was lying there with no one on board. He went into the hold because he
was afraid of some dogs on shore. He found down there a heap of empty
sacks, which made a luxurious couch, and being exhausted went to sleep
like a stone. Some time during the night the crew came on board and the
tartane sailed for Marseilles. That was another awful scare--being
hauled out by the scruff of the neck on the deck and being asked who the
devil he was and what he was doing there. Only from that one he could
not run away. There was water all around him and the whole world,
including the coast not very far away, wobbled in a most alarming
manner. Three bearded men stood about him and he tried to explain to
them that he had been working at Peyrol’s. Peyrol was the farmer’s name.
The boy didn’t know that he had one of his own. Moreover he didn’t know
very well how to talk to people, and they must have misunderstood him.
Thus the name of Peyrol stuck to him for life.

There the memories of his native country stopped, overlaid by other
memories, with a multitude of impressions of endless oceans, of the
Mozambique Channel, of Arabs and negroes, of Madagascar, of the coast of
India, of islands and channels and reefs; of fights at sea, rows on
shore, desperate slaughter and desperate thirst, of all sorts of ships
one after another: merchant ships and frigates and privateers; of
reckless men and enormous sprees. In the course of years he had learned
to speak intelligibly and think connectedly, and even to read and write
after a fashion. The name of the farmer Peyrol attached to his person on
account of his inability to give a clear account of himself acquired a
sort of reputation, both openly, in the ports of the East and, secretly,
amongst the Brothers of the Coast, that strange fraternity with
something masonic and not a little piratical in its constitution. Round
the Cape of Storms, which is also the Cape of Good Hope, the words
Republic, Nation, Tyranny, Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, and the
cult of the Supreme Being came floating on board ships from home: new
cries and new ideas which did not upset the slowly developed
intelligence of the gunner Peyrol. They seemed the invention of
landsmen, of whom the seaman Peyrol knew very little--nothing, so to
speak. Now after nearly fifty years of lawful and lawless sea-life
Citizen Peyrol, at the yard gate of the roadside inn, looked at the late
scene of his childhood. He looked at it without any animosity but a
little puzzled as to his bearings amongst the features of the land.
“Yes, it must be somewhere in that direction,” he thought vaguely.
Decidedly he would go no further along the high road.... A few yards
away the woman of the inn stood looking at him, impressed by the good
clothes, the great shaven cheeks, the well-to-do air of that seaman; and
suddenly Peyrol noticed her. With her anxious brown face, her grey
locks, and her rustic appearance she might have been his mother, as he
remembered her, only she wasn’t in rags.

“Hé! la mère,” hailed Peyrol. “Have you got a man to lend a hand with my
chest into the house?”

He looked so prosperous and so authoritative that she piped without
hesitation in a thin voice, “Mais oui, citoyen. He will be here in a
moment.”

In the dusk the clump of pines across the road looked very black against
the quiet clear sky; and Citizen Peyrol gazed at the scene of his young
misery with the greatest possible placidity. Here he was after nearly
fifty years, and to look at things it seemed like yesterday. He felt for
all this neither love nor resentment. He felt a little funny as it were,
and the funniest thing was the thought which crossed his mind that he
could indulge his fancy (if he had a mind to it) to buy up all this land
to the furthermost field, away over there where the track lost itself
sinking into the flats bordering the sea where the small rise at the end
of the Giens peninsula had assumed the appearance of a black cloud.

“Tell me, my friend,” he said in his magisterial way to the farmhand
with a tousled head of hair who was awaiting his good pleasure, “doesn’t
this track lead to Almanarre?”

“Yes,” said the labourer, and Peyrol nodded. The man continued mouthing
his words slowly as if unused to speech. “To Almanarre and further too,
beyond the great pond right out to the end of the land, to Cape
Esterel.”

Peyrol was lending his big flat hairy ear. “If I had stayed in this
country,” he thought, “I would be talking like this fellow.” And aloud
he asked:

“Are there any houses there, at the end of the land?”

“Why, a hamlet, a hole, just a few houses round a church, and a farm
where at one time they would give you a glass of wine.”




II


Citizen Peyrol stayed at the inn-yard gate till the night had swallowed
up all those features of the land to which his eyes had clung as long as
the last gleams of daylight. And even after the last gleams had gone he
had remained for some time staring into the darkness, in which all he
could distinguish was the white road at his feet and the black heads of
pines where the cart track dipped towards the coast. He did not go
indoors till some carters who had been refreshing themselves had
departed with their big two-wheeled carts, piled up high with empty
wine-casks, in the direction of Fréjus. The fact that they did not
remain for the night pleased Peyrol. He ate his bit of supper alone, in
silence, and with a gravity which intimidated the old woman who had
aroused in him the memory of his mother. Having finished his pipe and
obtained a bit of candle in a tin candlestick, Citizen Peyrol went
heavily upstairs to rejoin his luggage. The crazy staircase shook and
groaned under his feet as though he had been carrying a burden. The
first thing he did was to close the shutters most carefully as though he
had been afraid of a breath of night air. Next he bolted the door of the
room. Then sitting on the floor, with the candlestick standing before
him between his widely straggled legs, he began to undress, flinging off
his coat and dragging his shirt hastily over his head. The secret of
his heavy movements was disclosed then in the fact that he had been
wearing next his bare skin--like a pious penitent his hair-shirt--a sort
of waistcoat made of two thicknesses of old sail-cloth and stitched all
over in the manner of a quilt with tarred twine. Three horn buttons
closed it in front. He undid them, and after he had slipped off the two
shoulder-straps which prevented this strange garment from sagging down
on his hips he started rolling it up. Notwithstanding all his care there
were during this operation several faint chinks of some metal which
could not have been lead.

His bare torso thrown backwards and sustained by his rigid big arms
heavily tattooed on the white skin above the elbows, Peyrol drew a long
breath into his broad chest with a pepper and salt pelt down the
breastbone. And not only was the breast of Citizen Peyrol relieved to
the fullest of its athletic capacity, but a change had also come over
his large physiognomy on which the expression of severe stolidity had
been simply the result of physical discomfort. It isn’t a trifle to have
to carry girt about your ribs and hung from your shoulders a mass of
mixed foreign coins equal to sixty or seventy thousand francs in hard
cash; while as to the paper money of the Republic, Peyrol had had
already enough experience of it to estimate the equivalent in cartloads.
A thousand of them. Perhaps two thousand. Enough in any case to justify
his flight of fancy, while looking at the countryside in the light of
the sunset, that what he had on him would buy all that soil from which
he had sprung: houses, woods, vines, olives, vegetable gardens, rocks
and salt lagoons--in fact, the whole landscape, including the animals
in it. But Peyrol did not care for the land at all. He did not want to
own any part of the solid earth for which he had no love. All he wanted
from it was a quiet nook, an obscure corner out of men’s sight where he
could dig a hole unobserved.

That would have to be done pretty soon, he thought. One could not live
for an indefinite number of days with a treasure strapped round one’s
chest. Meantime, an utter stranger in his native country the landing on
which was perhaps the biggest adventure in his adventurous life, he
threw his jacket over the rolled-up waistcoat and laid his head down on
it after extinguishing the candle. The night was warm. The floor of the
room happened to be of planks, not of tiles. He was no stranger to that
sort of couch. With his cudgel laid ready at his hand Peyrol slept
soundly till the noises and the voices about the house and on the road
woke him up shortly after sunrise. He threw open the shutter, welcoming
the morning light and the morning breeze in the full enjoyment of
idleness which, to a seaman of his kind, is inseparable from the fact of
being on shore. There was nothing to trouble his thoughts; and though
his physiognomy was far from being vacant, it did not wear the aspect of
profound meditation.

It had been by the merest accident that he had discovered during the
passage, in a secret recess within one of the lockers of his prize, two
bags of mixed coins: gold mohurs, Dutch ducats, Spanish pieces, English
guineas. After making that discovery he had suffered from no doubts
whatever. Loot, big or little, was a natural fact of his freebooter’s
life. And now when by the force of things he had become a master-gunner
of the Navy he was not going to give up his find to confounded landsmen,
mere sharks, hungry quill-drivers, who would put it in their own
pockets. As to imparting the intelligence to his crew (all bad
characters), he was much too wise to do anything of the kind. They would
not have been above cutting his throat. An old fighting sea-dog, a
Brother of the Coast, had more right to such plunder than anybody on
earth. So at odd times, while at sea, he had busied himself within the
privacy of his cabin in constructing the ingenious canvas waistcoat in
which he could take his treasure ashore secretly. It was bulky, but his
garments were of an ample cut, and no wretched customs-guard would dare
to lay hands on a successful prize-master going to the Port Admiral’s
offices to make his report. The scheme had worked perfectly. He found,
however, that this secret garment, which was worth precisely its weight
in gold, tried his endurance more than he had expected. It wearied his
body and even depressed his spirits somewhat. It made him less active
and also less communicative. It reminded him all the time that he must
not get into trouble of any sort--keep clear of rows, of intimacies, of
promiscuous jollities. This was one of the reasons why he had been
anxious to get away from the town. Once, however, his head was laid on
his treasure he could sleep the sleep of the just.

Nevertheless in the morning he shrank from putting it on again. With a
mixture of sailor’s carelessness and of old-standing belief in his own
luck he simply stuffed the precious waistcoat up the flue of the empty
fireplace. Then he dressed and had his breakfast. An hour later,
mounted on a hired mule, he started down the track as calmly as though
setting out to explore the mysteries of a desert island.

His aim was the end of the peninsula which, advancing like a colossal
jetty into the sea, divides the picturesque roadstead of Hyères from the
headlands and curves of the coast forming the approaches of the Port of
Toulon. The path along which the sure-footed mule took him (for Peyrol,
once he had put its head the right way, made no attempt at steering)
descended rapidly to a plain of arid aspect, with the white gleams of
the Salins in the distance, bounded by bluish hills of no great
elevation. Soon all traces of human habitations disappeared from before
his roaming eyes. This part of his native country was more foreign to
him than the shores of the Mozambique Channel, the coral strands of
India, the forests of Madagascar. Before long he found himself on the
neck of the Giens peninsula, impregnated with salt and containing a blue
lagoon, particularly blue, darker and even more still than the expanses
of the sea to the right and left of it, from which it was separated by
narrow strips of land not a hundred yards wide in places. The track ran
indistinct, presenting no wheel-ruts, and with patches of efflorescent
salt as white as snow between the tufts of wiry grass and the
particularly dead-looking bushes. The whole neck of land was so low that
it seemed to have no more thickness than a sheet of paper laid on the
sea. Citizen Peyrol saw on the level of his eye, as if from a mere raft,
sails of various craft, some white and some brown, while before him his
native island of Porquerolles rose dull and solid beyond a wide strip of
water. The mule, which knew rather better than Citizen Peyrol where it
was going to, took him presently amongst the gentle rises at the end of
the peninsula. The slopes were covered with scanty grass; crooked
boundary walls of dry stones ran across the fields, and above them, here
and there, peeped a low roof of red tiles shaded by the heads of
delicate acacias. At a turn of the ravine appeared a village with its
few houses, mostly with their blind walls to the path, and, at first, no
living soul in sight. Three tall platanes, very ragged as to their bark
and very poor as to foliage, stood in a group in an open space; and
Citizen Peyrol was cheered up by the sight of a dog sleeping in the
shade. The mule swerved with great determination towards a massive stone
trough under the village fountain. Peyrol, looking round from the saddle
while the mule drank, could see no signs of an inn. Then, examining the
ground nearer to him, he perceived a ragged man sitting on a stone. He
had a broad leathern belt and his legs were bare to the knee. He was
contemplating the stranger on the mule with stony surprise. His dark
nut-brown face contrasted strongly with his grey shock of hair. At a
sign from Peyrol he showed no reluctance and approached him readily
without changing the stony character of his stare.

The thought that if he had remained at home he would have probably
looked like that man crossed unbidden the mind of Peyrol. With that
gravity from which he seldom departed he inquired if there were any
inhabitants besides himself in the village. Then, to Peyrol’s surprise,
that destitute idler smiled pleasantly and said that the people were out
looking after their bits of land.

There was enough of the peasant-born in Peyrol, still, to remark that he
had seen no man, woman, or child, or four-footed beast for hours, and
that he would hardly have thought that there was any land worth looking
after anywhere around. But the other insisted. Well, they were working
on it all the same, at least those that had any.

At the sound of the voices the dog got up with a strange air of being
all backbone, and, approaching in dismal fidelity, stood with his nose
close to his master’s calves.

“And you,” said Peyrol, “you have no land then?” The man took his time
to answer. “I have a boat.”

Peyrol became interested when the man explained that his boat was on the
salt pond, the large, deserted and opaque sheet of water lying dead
between the two great bays of the living sea. Peyrol wondered aloud why
anyone should want a boat on it.

“There is fish there,” said the man.

“And is the boat all your worldly goods?” asked Peyrol.

The flies buzzed, the mule hung its head, moving its ears and flapping
its thin tail languidly.

“I have a sort of hut down by the lagoon and a net or two,” the man
confessed, as it were. Peyrol, looking down, completed the list by
saying: “And this dog.”

The man again took his time to say:

“He is company.”

Peyrol sat as serious as a judge. “You haven’t much to make a living
of,” he delivered himself at last. “However!... Is there no inn, café,
or some place where one could put up for a day? I have heard up inland
that there was some such place.”

“I will show it to you,” said the man, who then went back to where he
had been sitting and picked up a large empty basket before he led the
way. His dog followed with his head and tail low, and then came Peyrol
dangling his heels against the sides of the intelligent mule, which
seemed to know beforehand all that was going to happen. At the corner
where the houses ended there stood an old wooden cross stuck into a
square block of stone. The lonely boatman of the Lagoon of Pesquiers
pointed in the direction of a branching path where the rises terminating
the peninsula sank into a shallow pass. There were leaning pines on the
skyline, and in the pass itself dull silvery green patches of olive
orchards below a long yellow wall backed by dark cypresses, and the red
roofs of buildings which seemed to belong to a farm.

“Will they lodge me there?” asked Peyrol.

“I don’t know. They will have plenty of room, that’s certain. There are
no travellers here. But as for a place of refreshment, it used to be
that. You have only got to walk in. If he isn’t there, the mistress is
sure to be there to serve you. She belongs to the place. She was born on
it. We know all about her.”

“What sort of woman is she?” asked Citizen Peyrol, who was very
favourably impressed by the aspect of the place.

“Well, you are going there. You shall soon see. She is young.”

“And the husband?” asked Peyrol, who, looking down into the other’s
steady upward stare, detected a flicker in the brown, slightly faded
eyes. “Why are you staring at me like this? I haven’t got a black skin,
have I?”

The other smiled, showing in the thick pepper and salt growth on his
face as sound a set of teeth as Citizen Peyrol himself. There was in his
bearing something embarrassed, but not unfriendly, and he uttered a
phrase from which Peyrol discovered that the man before him, the lonely
hirsute, sunburnt and barelegged human being at his stirrup, nourished
patriotic suspicions as to his character. And this seemed to him
outrageous. He wanted to know in a severe voice whether he looked like a
confounded landsman of any kind. He swore also without, however, losing
any of the dignity of expression inherent in his type of features and in
the very modelling of his flesh.

“For an aristocrat you don’t look like one, but neither do you look like
a farmer or a pedlar or a patriot. You don’t look like anything that has
been seen here for years and years and years. You look like one, I dare
hardly say what. You might be a priest.”

Astonishment kept Peyrol perfectly quiet on his mule. “Do I dream?” he
asked himself mentally. “You aren’t mad?” he asked aloud. “Do you know
what you are talking about? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”

“All the same,” persisted the other innocently, “it is much less than
ten years ago since I saw one of them of the sort they call Bishops, who
had a face exactly like yours.”

Instinctively Peyrol passed his hand over his face. What could there be
in it? Peyrol could not remember ever having seen a Bishop in his life.
The fellow stuck to his point, for he puckered his brow and murmured:

“Others too.... I remember perfectly.... It isn’t so many years ago.
Some of them skulk amongst the villages yet, for all the chasing they
got from the patriots.”

The sun blazed on the boulders and stones and bushes in the perfect
stillness of the air. The mule, disregarding with republican austerity
the neighbourhood of a stable within less than a hundred and twenty
yards, dropped its head, and even its ears, and dozed as if in the
middle of a desert. The dog, apparently changed into stone at his
master’s heel, seemed to be dozing too with his nose near the ground.
Peyrol had fallen into a deep meditation, and the boatman of the lagoon
awaited the solution of his doubts without eagerness and with something
like a grin within his thick beard. Peyrol’s face cleared. He had solved
the problem, but there was a shade of vexation in his tone.

“Well, it can’t be helped,” he said. “I learned to shave from the
English. I suppose that’s what’s the matter.”

At the name of the English the boatman pricked up his ears.

“One can’t tell where they are all gone to,” he murmured. “Only three
years ago they swarmed about this coast in their big ships. You saw
nothing but them, and they were fighting all round Toulon on land. Then
in a week or two, crac!--nobody! Cleared out devil knows where. But
perhaps you would know.”

“Oh, yes,” said Peyrol, “I know all about the English, don’t you worry
your head.”

“I am not troubling my head. It is for you to think about what’s best to
say when you speak with him up there. I mean the master of the farm.”

“He can’t be a better patriot than I am, for all my shaven face,” said
Peyrol. “That would only seem strange to a savage like you.”

With an unexpected sigh the man sat down at the foot of the cross, and,
immediately, his dog went off a little way and curled himself up amongst
the tufts of grass.

“We are all savages here,” said the forlorn fisherman from the lagoon.
“But the master up there is a real patriot from the town. If you were
ever to go to Toulon and ask people about him they would tell you. He
first became busy purveying the guillotine when they were purifying the
town from all aristocrats. That was even before the English came in.
After the English got driven out there was more of that work than the
guillotine could do. They had to kill traitors in the streets, in
cellars, in their beds. The corpses of men and women were lying in heaps
along the quays. There were a good many of his sort that got the name of
drinkers of blood. Well, he was one of the best of them. I am only just
telling you.”

Peyrol nodded. “That will do me all right,” he said. And before he could
pick up the reins and hit it with his heels the mule, as though it had
just waited for his words, started off along the path.

In less than five minutes Peyrol was dismounting in front of a low, long
addition to a tall farmhouse with very few windows, and flanked by walls
of stones enclosing not only the yard but apparently a field or two
also. A gateway stood open to the left, but Peyrol dismounted at the
door, through which he entered a bare room, with rough whitewashed walls
and a few wooden chairs and tables, which might have been a rustic café.
He tapped with his knuckles on the table. A young woman with a fichu
round her neck and a striped white and red skirt, with black hair and a
red mouth, appeared in an inner doorway.

“Bonjour, citoyenne,” said Peyrol. She was so startled by the unusual
aspect of this stranger that she answered him only by a murmured
“Bonjour,” but in a moment she came forward and waited expectantly. The
perfect oval of her face, the colour of her smooth cheeks, and the
whiteness of her throat forced from the Citizen Peyrol a slight hiss
through his clenched teeth.

“I am thirsty, of course,” he said, “but what I really want is to know
whether I can stay here.”

The sound of a mule’s hoofs outside caused Peyrol to start, but the
woman arrested him.

“She is only going to the shed. She knows the way. As to what you said,
the master will be here directly. Nobody ever comes here. And how long
would you want to stay?”

The old rover of the seas looked at her searchingly.

“To tell you the truth, citoyenne, it may be in a manner of speaking for
ever.”

She smiled in a bright flash of teeth, without gaiety or any change in
her restless eyes that roamed about the empty room as though Peyrol had
come in attended by a mob of shades.

“It’s like me,” she said. “I lived as a child here.”

“You are but little more than that now,” said Peyrol, examining her with
a feeling that was no longer surprise or curiosity, but seemed to be
lodged in his very breast.

“Are you a patriot?” she asked, still surveying the invisible company in
the room.

Peyrol, who had thought that he had “done with all that damned
nonsense,” felt angry and also at a loss for an answer.

“I am a Frenchman,” he said bluntly.

“Arlette!” called out an aged woman’s voice through the open inner door.

“What do you want?” she answered readily.

“There’s a saddled mule come into the yard.”

“All right. The man is here.” Her eyes, which had steadied, began to
wander again all round and about the motionless Peyrol. She moved a step
nearer to him and asked in a low confidential tone: “Have you ever
carried a woman’s head on a pike?”

Peyrol, who had seen fights, massacres on land and sea, towns taken by
assault by savage warriors, who had killed men in attack and defence,
found himself at first bereft of speech by this simple question, and
next moved to speak bitterly.

“No. I have heard men boast of having done so. They were mostly
braggarts with craven hearts. But what is all this to you?”

She was not listening to him, the edge of her white even teeth pressing
her lower lip, her eyes never at rest. Peyrol remembered suddenly the
sans-culotte--the blood-drinker. Her husband. Was it possible?... Well,
perhaps it was possible. He could not tell. He felt his utter
incompetence. As to catching her glance, you might just as well have
tried to catch a wild sea-bird with your hands. And altogether she was
like a sea-bird--not to be grasped. But Peyrol knew how to be patient,
with that patience that is so often a form of courage. He was known for
it. It had served him well in dangerous situations. Once it had
positively saved his life. Nothing but patience. He could well wait now.
He waited. And suddenly as if tamed by his patience this strange
creature dropped her eyelids, advanced quite close to him and began to
finger the lapel of his coat--something that a child might have done.
Peyrol all but gasped with surprise, but he remained perfectly still. He
was disposed to hold his breath. He was touched by a soft indefinite
emotion, and as her eyelids remained lowered till her black lashes
seemed to lie like a shadow on her pale cheek, there was no need for him
to force a smile. After the first moment he was not even surprised. It
was merely the sudden movement, not the nature of the act itself, that
had startled him.

“Yes. You may stay. I think we shall be friends. I’ll tell you about the
Revolution.”

At these words Peyrol, the man of violent deeds, felt something like a
chill breath at the back of his head.

“What’s the good of that?” he said.

“It must be,” she said and backed away from him swiftly, and without
raising her eyes turned round and was gone in a moment, so lightly that
one would have thought her feet had not touched the ground. Peyrol,
staring at the open kitchen door, saw after a moment an elderly woman’s
head, with brown thin cheeks and tied up in a coloured handkerchief,
peeping at him fearfully.

“A bottle of wine, please,” he shouted at it.




III


The affectation common to seamen of never being surprised at anything
that sea or land can produce had become in Peyrol a second nature.
Having learned from childhood to suppress every sign of wonder before
all extraordinary sights and events, all strange people, all strange
customs, and the most alarming phenomena of nature (as manifested, for
instance, in the violence of volcanoes or the fury of human beings), he
had really become indifferent--or only perhaps utterly inexpressive. He
had seen so much that was bizarre or atrocious, and had heard so many
astounding tales, that his usual mental reaction before a new experience
was generally formulated in the words “J’en ai vu bien d’autres.” The
last thing which had touched him with the panic of the supernatural had
been the death under a heap of rags of that gaunt, fierce woman, his
mother; and the last thing that had nearly overwhelmed him at the age of
twelve with another kind of terror was the riot of sound and the
multitude of mankind on the quays in Marseilles, something perfectly
inconceivable from which he had instantly taken refuge behind a stack of
wheat sacks after having been chased ashore from the tartane. He had
remained there quaking till a man in a cocked hat and with a sabre at
his side (the boy had never seen either such a hat or such a sabre in
his life) had seized him by the arm close to the armpit and had hauled
him out from there; a man who might have been an ogre (only Peyrol had
never heard of an ogre), but at any rate in his own way was alarming and
wonderful beyond anything he could have imagined--if the faculty of
imagination had been developed in him then. No doubt all this was enough
to make one die of fright, but that possibility never occurred to him.
Neither did he go mad; but being only a child, he had simply adapted
himself, by means of passive acquiescence, to the new and inexplicable
conditions of life in something like twenty-four hours. After that
initiation the rest of his existence, from flying fishes to whales and
on to black men and coral reefs, to decks running with blood, and thirst
in open boats, was comparatively plain sailing. By the time he had heard
of a Revolution in France and of certain Immortal Principles causing the
death of many people, from the mouths of seamen and travellers and
year-old gazettes coming out of Europe, he was ready to appreciate
contemporary history in his own particular way. Mutiny and throwing
officers overboard. He had seen that twice and he was on a different
side each time. As to this upset, he took no side. It was too far--too
big--also not distinct enough. But he acquired the revolutionary jargon
quickly enough and used it on occasions, with secret contempt. What he
had gone through, from a spell of crazy love for a yellow girl to the
experience of treachery from a bosom friend and shipmate (and both those
things Peyrol confessed to himself he could never hope to understand),
with all the graduations of varied experience of men and passions
between, had put a drop of universal scorn, a wonderful sedative, into
the strange mixture which might have been called the soul of the
returned Peyrol.

Therefore he not only showed no surprise but did not feel any when he
beheld the master, in the right of his wife, of the Escampobar Farm. The
homeless Peyrol, sitting in the bare salle with a bottle of wine before
him, was in the act of raising the glass to his lips when the man
entered, ex-orator in the sections, leader of red-capped mobs, hunter of
the ci-devants and priests, purveyor of the guillotine, in short a
blood-drinker. And Citizen Peyrol, who had never been nearer than six
thousand miles as the crow flies to the realities of the Revolution, put
down his glass and in his deep unemotional voice said: “Salut.”

The other returned a much fainter “Salut,” staring at the stranger of
whom he had heard already. His almond-shaped, soft eyes were noticeably
shiny and so was to a certain extent the skin on his high but rounded
cheekbones, coloured red like a mask of which all the rest was but a
mass of clipped chestnut hair growing so thick and close around the lips
as to hide altogether the design of the mouth which, for all Citizen
Peyrol knew, might have been of a quite ferocious character. A careworn
forehead and a perpendicular nose suggested a certain austerity proper
to an ardent patriot. He held in his hand a long bright knife which he
laid down on one of the tables at once. He didn’t seem more than thirty
years old, a well-made man of medium height, with a lack of resolution
in his bearing. Something like disillusion was suggested by the set of
his shoulders. The effect was subtle, but Peyrol became aware of it
while he explained his case and finished the tale by declaring that he
was a seaman of the Republic and that he had always done his duty before
the enemy.

The blood-drinker had listened profoundly. The high arches of his
eyebrows gave him an astonished look. He came close up to the table and
spoke in a trembling voice.

“You may have! But you may all the same be corrupt. The seamen of the
Republic were eaten up with corruption paid for with the gold of the
tyrants. Who would have guessed it? They all talked like patriots. And
yet the English entered the harbour and landed in the town without
opposition. The armies of the Republic drove them out, but treachery
stalks in the land, it comes up out of the ground, it sits at our
hearthstones, lurks in the bosom of the representatives of the people,
of our fathers, of our brothers. There was a time when civic virtue
flourished, but now it has got to hide its head. And I will tell you
why: there has not been enough killing. It seems as if there could never
be enough of it. It’s discouraging. Look what we have come to.”

His voice died in his throat as though he had suddenly lost confidence
in himself.

“Bring another glass, citoyen,” said Peyrol, after a short pause, “and
let’s drink together. We will drink to the confusion of traitors. I
detest treachery as much as any man, but....”

He waited till the other had returned, then poured out the wine, and
after they had touched glasses and half emptied them, he put down his
own and continued:

“But you see I have nothing to do with your politics. I was at the other
side of the world, therefore you can’t suspect me of being a traitor.
You showed no mercy, you other sans-culottes, to the enemies of the
Republic at home, and I killed her enemies abroad far away. You were
cutting off heads without much compunction....”

The other most unexpectedly shut his eyes for a moment, then opened them
very wide. “Yes, yes,” he assented very low. “Pity may be a crime.”

“Yes. And I knocked the enemies of the Republic on the head whenever I
had them before me without inquiring about the number. It seems to me
that you and I ought to get on together.”

The master of Escampobar farmhouse murmured, however, that in times like
these nothing could be taken as proof positive. It behoved every patriot
to nurse suspicion in his breast. No sign of impatience escaped Peyrol.
He was rewarded for his self-restraint and the unshaken good-humour with
which he had conducted the discussion by carrying his point. Citizen
Scevola Bron (for that appeared to be the name of the master of the
farm), an object of fear and dislike to the other inhabitants of the
Giens peninsula, might have been influenced by a wish to have someone
with whom he could exchange a few words from time to time. No villagers
ever came up to the farm, or were likely to, unless perhaps in a body
and animated with hostile intentions. They resented his presence in
their part of the world sullenly.

“Where do you come from?” was the last question he asked.

“I left Toulon two days ago.”

Citizen Scevola struck the table with his fist, but this manifestation
of energy was very momentary.

“And that was the town of which by a decree not a stone upon another was
to be left,” he complained, much depressed.

“Most of it is still standing,” Peyrol assured him calmly. “I don’t know
whether it deserved the fate you say was decreed for it. I was there for
the last month or so and I know it contains some good patriots. I know
because I made friends with them all.” Thereupon Peyrol mentioned a few
names which the retired sans-culotte greeted with a bitter smile and an
ominous silence, as though the bearers of them had been only good for
the scaffold and the guillotine.

“Come along and I will show you the place where you will sleep,” he said
with a sigh, and Peyrol was only too ready. They entered the kitchen
together. Through the open back door a large square of sunshine fell on
the floor of stone flags. Outside one could see quite a mob of expectant
chickens, while a yellow hen postured on the very doorstep, darting her
head right and left with affectation. An old woman holding a bowl full
of broken food put it down suddenly on a table and stared. The vastness
and cleanliness of the place impressed Peyrol favourably.

“You will eat with us here,” said his guide, and passed without stopping
into a narrow passage giving access to a steep flight of stairs. Above
the first landing a narrow spiral staircase led to the upper part of the
farmhouse; and when the sans-culotte flung open the solid plank door at
which it ended he disclosed to Peyrol a large low room containing a
four-poster bedstead piled up high with folded blankets and spare
pillows. There were also two wooden chairs and a large oval table.

“We could arrange this place for you,” said the master, “but I don’t
know what the mistress will have to say,” he added.

Peyrol, struck by the peculiar expression of his face, turned his head
and saw the girl standing in the doorway. It was as though she had
floated up after them, for not the slightest sound of rustle or footfall
had warned Peyrol of her presence. The pure complexion of her white
cheeks was set off brilliantly by her coral lips and the bands of raven
black hair only partly covered by a muslin cap trimmed with lace. She
made no sign, uttered no sound, behaved exactly as if there had been
nobody in the room; and Peyrol suddenly averted his eyes from that mute
and unconscious face with its roaming eyes.

In some way or other, however, the sans-culotte seemed to have
ascertained her mind, for he said in a final tone:

“That’s all right then,” and there was a short silence, during which the
woman shot her dark glances all round the room again and again, while on
her lips there was a half-smile, not so much absent-minded as totally
unmotived, which Peyrol observed with a side glance, but could not make
anything of. She did not seem to know him at all.

“You have a view of salt water on three sides of you,” remarked Peyrol’s
future host.

The farmhouse was a tall building, and this large attic with its three
windows commanded on one side the view of Hyères Roadstead on the first
plan, with further blue undulations of the coast as far as Fréjus; and
on the other the vast semicircle of barren high hills, broken by the
entrance to Toulon harbour guarded by forts and batteries, and ending
in Cape Cépet, a squat mountain, with sombre folds and a base of brown
rocks, with a white spot gleaming on the very summit of it, a ci-devant
shrine dedicated to Our Lady, and a ci-devant place of pilgrimage. The
noonday glare seemed absorbed by the gemlike surface of the sea
perfectly flawless in the invincible depth of its colour.

“It’s like being in a lighthouse,” said Peyrol. “Not a bad place for a
seaman to live in.” The sight of the sails dotted about cheered his
heart. The people of landsmen with their houses and animals and
activities did not count. What made for him the life of any strange
shore were the craft that belonged to it: canoes, catamarans, ballahous,
praus, lorchas, mere dug-outs, or even rafts of tied logs with a bit of
mat for a sail from which naked brown men fished along stretches of
white sand crushed under the tropical skyline, sinister in its glare and
with a thunder-cloud crouching on the horizon. But here he beheld a
perfect serenity, nothing sombre on the shore, nothing ominous in the
sunshine. The sky rested lightly on the distant and vaporous outline of
the hills; and the immobility of all things seemed poised in the air
like a gay mirage. On this tideless sea several tartanes lay becalmed in
the Petite Passe between Porquerolles and Cape Esterel, yet theirs was
not the stillness of death but of light slumber, the immobility of a
smiling enchantment, of a Mediterranean fair day, breathless sometimes
but never without life. Whatever enchantment Peyrol had known in his
wanderings it had never been so remote from all thoughts of strife and
death, so full of smiling security, making all his past appear to him
like a chain of lurid days and sultry nights. He thought he would never
want to get away from it, as though he had obscurely felt that his old
rover’s soul had been always rooted there. Yes, this was the place for
him; not because expediency dictated, but simply because his instinct of
rest had found its home at last.

He turned away from the window and found himself face to face with the
sans-culotte, who had apparently come up to him from behind, perhaps
with the intention of tapping him on the shoulder, but who now turned
away his head. The young woman had disappeared.

“Tell me, patron,” said Peyrol, “is there anywhere near this house a
little dent in the shore with a bit of beach in it perhaps where I could
keep a boat?”

“What do you want a boat for?”

“To go fishing when I have a fancy to,” answered Peyrol curtly.

Citizen Bron, suddenly subdued, told him that what he wanted was to be
found a couple of hundred yards down the hill from the house. The coast,
of course, was full of indentations, but this was a perfect little pool.
And the Toulon blood-drinker’s almond-shaped eyes became strangely
sombre as they gazed at the attentive Peyrol. A perfect little pool, he
repeated, opening from a cove that the English knew well. He paused.
Peyrol observed without much animosity but in a tone of conviction that
it was very difficult to keep off the English whenever there was a bit
of salt water anywhere; but what could have brought English seamen to a
spot like this he couldn’t imagine.

“It was when their fleet first came here,” said the patriot in a gloomy
voice, “and hung round the coast before the anti-revolutionary traitors
let them into Toulon, sold the sacred soil of their country for a
handful of gold. Yes, in the days before the crime was consummated
English officers used to land in that cove at night and walk up to this
very house.”

“What audacity!” commented Peyrol, who was really surprised. “But that’s
just like what they are.” Still, it was hard to believe. But wasn’t it
only a tale?

The patriot flung one arm up in a strained gesture. “I swore to its
truth before the tribunal,” he said. “It was a dark story,” he cried
shrilly, and paused. “It cost her father his life,” he said in a low
voice ... “her mother too--but the country was in danger,” he added
still lower.

Peyrol walked away to the western window and looked towards Toulon. In
the middle of the great sheet of water within Cape Cicié a tall
two-decker lay becalmed and the little dark dots on the water were her
boats trying to tow her head round the right way. Peyrol watched them
for a moment, and then walked back to the middle of the room.

“Did you actually drag him from this house to the guillotine?” he asked
in his unemotional voice.

The patriot shook his head thoughtfully, with downcast eyes. “No, he
came over to Toulon just before the evacuation, this friend of the
English ... sailed over in a tartane he owned that is still lying here
at the Madrague. He had his wife with him. They came over to take home
their daughter, who was living then with some skulking old nuns. The
victorious Republicans were closing in and the slaves of tyranny had to
fly.”

“Came to fetch their daughter,” mused Peyrol. “Strange, that guilty
people should....”

The patriot looked up fiercely. “It was justice,” he said loudly. “They
were anti-revolutionists, and if they had never spoken to an Englishman
in their life the atrocious crime was on their heads.”

“H’m, stayed too long for their daughter,” muttered Peyrol. “And so it
was you who brought her home.”

“I did,” said the patron. For a moment his eyes evaded Peyrol’s
investigating glance, but in a moment he looked straight into his face.
“No lessons of base superstition could corrupt her soul,” he declared
with exaltation. “I brought home a patriot.”

Peyrol, very calm, gave him a hardly perceptible nod. “Well,” he said,
“all this won’t prevent me sleeping very well in this room. I always
thought I would like to live in a lighthouse when I got tired of roving
about the seas. This is as near a lighthouse lantern as can be. You will
see me with all my little affairs to-morrow,” he added, moving towards
the stairs. “Salut, citoyen.”

There was in Peyrol a fund of self-command amounting to placidity. There
were men living in the East who had no doubt whatever that Peyrol was a
calmly terrible man. And they would quote illustrative instances which
from their own point of view were simply admirable. But all Peyrol had
ever done was to behave rationally, as it seemed to him, in all sorts of
dangerous circumstances without ever being led astray by the nature, or
the cruelty, or the danger of any given situation. He adapted himself
to the character of the event and to the very spirit of it, with a
profound responsive feeling of a particularly unsentimental kind.
Sentiment in itself was an artificiality of which he had never heard and
if he had seen it in action would have appeared to him too puzzling to
make anything of. That sort of genuineness in acceptance made him a
satisfactory inmate of the Escampobar Farm. He duly turned up with all
his cargo, as he called it, and was met at the door of the farmhouse
itself by the young woman with the pale face and wandering eyes. Nothing
could hold her attention for long amongst her familiar surroundings.
Right and left and far away beyond you, she seemed to be looking for
something while you were talking to her, so that you doubted whether she
could follow what you said. But as a matter of fact she had all her wits
about her. In the midst of this strange search for something that was
not there she had enough detachment to smile at Peyrol. Then,
withdrawing into the kitchen, she watched, as much as her restless eyes
could watch anything, Peyrol’s cargo and Peyrol himself passing up the
stairs.

The most valuable part of Peyrol’s cargo being strapped to his person,
the first thing he did after being left alone in that attic room which
was like the lantern of a lighthouse was to relieve himself of the
burden and lay it on the foot of the bed. Then he sat down, and leaning
his elbow far on the table he contemplated it with a feeling of complete
relief. That plunder had never burdened his conscience. It had merely on
occasion oppressed his body; and if it had at all affected his spirits
it was not by its secrecy but by its mere weight, which was
inconvenient, irritating, and towards the end of a day altogether
insupportable. It made a free-limbed, deep-breathing sailor-man feel
like a mere overloaded animal, thus extending whatever there was of
compassion in Peyrol’s nature towards the four-footed beasts that carry
men’s burdens on the earth. The necessities of a lawless life had taught
Peyrol to be ruthless, but he had never been cruel.

Sprawling in the chair, stripped to the waist, robust and grey-haired,
his head with a Roman profile propped up on a mighty and tattooed
forearm, he remained at ease, with his eyes fixed on his treasure with
an air of meditation. Yet Peyrol was not meditating (as a superficial
observer might have thought) on the best place of concealment. It was
not that he had not had a great experience of that sort of property
which had always melted so quickly through his fingers. What made him
meditative was its character, not of a share of a hard-won booty in
toil, in risk, in danger, in privation, but of a piece of luck
personally his own. He knew what plunder was and how soon it went; but
this lot had come to stay. He had it with him, away from the haunts of
his lifetime, as if in another world altogether. It couldn’t be drunk
away, gambled away, squandered away in any sort of familiar
circumstances, or even given away. In that room, raised a good many feet
above his revolutionized native land where he was more of a stranger
than anywhere else in the world, in this roomy garret full of light and
as it were surrounded by the sea, in a great sense of peace and
security, Peyrol didn’t see why he should bother his head about it so
very much. It came to him that he had never really cared for any
plunder that fell into his hands. No, never for any. And to take
particular care of this for which no one would seek vengeance or attempt
recovery would have been absurd. Peyrol got up and opened his big
sandalwood chest secured with an enormous padlock, part, too, of some
old plunder gathered in a Chinese town in the Gulf of Tonkin, in company
of certain Brothers of the Coast, who having boarded at night a
Portuguese schooner and sent her crew adrift in a boat, had taken a
cruise on their own account, years and years and years ago. He was young
then, very young, and the chest fell to his share because nobody else
would have anything to do with the cumbersome thing, and also for the
reason that the metal of the curiously wrought thick hoops that
strengthened it was not gold but mere brass. He, in his innocence, had
been rather pleased with the article. He had carried it about with him
into all sorts of places, and also he had left it behind him--once for a
whole year in a dark and noisome cavern on a certain part of the
Madagascar coast. He had left it with various native chiefs, with Arabs,
with a gambling-hell keeper in Pondicherry, with his various friends in
short, and even with his enemies. Once he had lost it altogether.

That was on the occasion when he had received a wound which laid him
open and gushing like a slashed wine-skin. A sudden quarrel broke out in
a company of Brothers over some matter of policy complicated by personal
jealousies, as to which he was as innocent as a babe unborn. He never
knew who gave him the slash. Another Brother, a chum of his, an English
boy, had rushed in and hauled him out of the fray, and then he had
remembered nothing for days. Even now when he looked at the scar he
could not understand why he had not died. That occurrence, with the
wound and the painful convalescence, was the first thing that sobered
his character somewhat. Many years afterwards, when in consequence of
his altered views of mere lawlessness he was serving as quartermaster on
board the _Hirondelle_, a comparatively respectable privateer, he caught
sight of that chest again in Port Louis, of all places in the world, in
a dark little den of a shop kept by a lone Hindoo. The hour was late,
the side street was empty, and so Peyrol went in there to claim his
property, all fair, a dollar in one hand and a pistol in the other, and
was entreated abjectly to take it away. He carried off the empty chest
on his shoulder, and that same night the privateer went to sea; then
only he found time to ascertain that he had made no mistake, because,
soon after he had got it first, he had, in grim wantonness, scratched
inside the lid, with the point of his knife, the rude outline of a skull
and cross-bones into which he had rubbed afterwards a little Chinese
vermilion. And there it was, the whole design, as fresh as ever.

In the garret full of light of the Escampobar farmhouse the grey-haired
Peyrol opened the chest, took all the contents out of it, laying them
neatly on the floor, and spread his treasure--pockets downwards--over
the bottom, which it filled exactly. Busy on his knees he repacked the
chest. A jumper or two, a fine cloth jacket, a remnant piece of
Madapolam muslin, costly stuff for which he had no use in the world--a
quantity of fine white shirts. Nobody would dare to rummage in his
chest, he thought, with the assurance of a man who had been feared in
his time. Then he rose, and looking round the room and stretching his
powerful arms, he ceased to think of the treasure, of the future and
even of to-morrow, in the sudden conviction that he could make himself
very comfortable there.




IV


In a tiny bit of a looking-glass hung on the frame of the east window,
Peyrol, handling the unwearable English blade, was shaving himself--for
the day was Sunday. The years of political changes ending with the
proclamation of Napoleon as Consul for life had not touched Peyrol
except as to his strong thick head of hair, which was nearly all white
now. After putting the razor away carefully, Peyrol introduced his
stockinged feet into a pair of sabots of the very best quality and
clattered downstairs. His brown cloth breeches were untied at the knee
and the sleeves of his shirt rolled up to his shoulders. That sea rover
turned rustic was now perfectly at home in that farm which, like a
lighthouse, commanded the view of two roadsteads and of the open sea. He
passed through the kitchen. It was exactly as he had seen it
first--sunlight on the floor, red copper utensils shining on the walls,
the table in the middle scrubbed snowy white; and it was only the old
woman, Aunt Catherine, who seemed to have acquired a sharper profile.
The very hen manœuvring her neck pretentiously on the doorstep, might
have been standing there for the last eight years. Peyrol shooed her
away, and going into the yard washed himself lavishly at the pump. When
he returned from the yard he looked so fresh and hale that old Catherine
complimented him in a thin voice on his “bonne mine.” Manners were
changing, and she addressed him no longer as citoyen but as Monsieur
Peyrol. He answered readily that if her heart was free he was ready to
lead her to the altar that very day. This was such an old joke that
Catherine took no notice of it whatever, but followed him with her eyes
as he crossed the kitchen into the salle, which was cool, with its
tables and benches washed clean, and no living soul in it. Peyrol passed
through to the front of the house, leaving the outer door open. At the
clatter of his clogs a young man sitting outside on a bench turned his
head and greeted him by a careless nod. His face was rather long,
sunburnt and smooth, with a slightly curved nose and a very well-shaped
chin. He wore a dark blue naval jacket open on a white shirt and a black
neckerchief tied in a slip-knot with long ends. White breeches and
stockings and black shoes with steel buckles completed his costume. A
brass-hilted sword in a black scabbard worn on a cross-belt was lying on
the ground at his feet. Peyrol, silver-headed and ruddy, sat down on the
bench at some little distance. The level piece of rocky ground in front
of the house was not very extensive, falling away to the sea in a
declivity framed between the rises of two barren hills. The old rover
and the young seaman with their arms folded across their chests gazed
into space, exchanging no words, like close intimates or like distant
strangers. Neither did they stir when the master of the Escampobar Farm
appeared out of the yard gate with a manure fork on his shoulder and
started to cross the piece of level ground. His grimy hands, his
rolled-up shirt-sleeves, the fork over the shoulder, the whole of his
working-day aspect had somehow an air of being a manifestation; but the
patriot dragged his dirty clogs low-spiritedly in the fresh light of the
young morning, in a way no real worker on the land would ever do at the
end of a day of toil. Yet there were no signs of debility about his
person. His oval face with rounded cheek-bones remained unwrinkled
except at the corners of his almond-shaped, shiny, visionary’s eyes,
which had not changed since the day when old Peyrol’s gaze had met them
for the first time. A few white hairs on his tousled head and in the
thin beard alone had marked the passage of years, and you would have had
to look for them closely. Amongst the unchangeable rocks at the extreme
end of the peninsula, time seemed to have stood still and idle while the
group of people poised at that southernmost point of France had gone
about their ceaseless toil, winning bread and wine from a stony-hearted
earth.

The master of the farm, staring straight before him, passed before the
two men towards the door of the salle, which Peyrol had left open. He
leaned his fork against the wall before going in. The sound of a distant
bell, the bell of the village where years ago the returned rover had
watered his mule and had listened to the talk of the man with the dog,
came up faint and abrupt in the great stillness of the upper space. The
violent slamming of the salle door broke the silence between the two
gazers on the sea.

“Does that fellow never rest?” asked the young man in a low indifferent
voice which covered the delicate tinkling of the bell, and without
moving his head.

“Not on Sunday anyhow,” answered the rover in the same detached manner.
“What can you expect? The church bell is like poison to him. That
fellow, I verily believe, has been born a sans-culotte. Every ‘decadi’
he puts on his best clothes, sticks a red cap on his head and wanders
between the buildings like a lost soul in the light of day. A Jacobin,
if ever there was one.”

“Yes. There is hardly a hamlet in France where there isn’t a
sans-culotte or two. But some of them have managed to change their skins
if nothing else.”

“This one won’t change his skin, and as to his inside he never had
anything in him that could be moved. Aren’t there some people that
remember him in Toulon? It isn’t such a long time ago. And yet....”
Peyrol turned slightly towards the young man.... “And yet to look at
him....”

The officer nodded and for a moment his face wore a troubled expression
which did not escape the notice of Peyrol, who went on speaking easily:

“Some time ago, when the priests began to come back to the parishes, he,
that fellow”--Peyrol jerked his head in the direction of the salle
door--“would you believe it?--started for the village with a sabre
hanging to his side and his red cap on his head. He made for the church
door. What he wanted to do there I don’t know. It surely could not have
been to say the proper kind of prayers. Well, the people were very much
elated about their reopened church, and as he went along some woman
spied him out of a window and started the alarm. ‘Eh, there! look! The
Jacobin, the sans-culotte, the blood-drinker! Look at him.’ Out rushed
some of them, and a man or two that were working in their home patches
vaulted over the low walls. Pretty soon there was a crowd, mostly
women, each with the first thing she could snatch up--stick, kitchen
knife, anything. A few men with spades and cudgels joined them by the
water-trough. He didn’t quite like that. What could he do? He turned and
bolted up the hill like a hare. It takes some pluck to face a mob of
angry women. He ran along the cart track without looking behind him, and
they after him, yelling: ‘A mort! A mort le buveur de sang!’ He had been
a horror and an abomination to the people for years, what with one story
and another, and now they thought it was their chance. The priest over
in the presbytery hears the noise, comes to the door. One look was
enough for him. He is a fellow of about forty but a wiry, long-legged
beggar, and agile--what? He just tucked up his skirts and dashed out,
taking short cuts over the walls and leaping from boulder to boulder
like a blessed goat. I was up in my room when the noise reached me
there. I went to the window and saw the chase in full cry after him. I
was beginning to think the fool would fetch all those furies along with
him up here and that they would carry the house by boarding and do for
the lot of us, when the priest cut in just in the nick of time. He could
have tripped Scevola as easy as anything, but he lets him pass and
stands in front of his parishioners with his arms extended. That did it.
He saved the patron all right. What he could say to quieten them I don’t
know, but these were early days and they were very fond of their new
priest. He could have turned them round his little finger. I had my head
and shoulders out of the window--it was interesting enough. They would
have massacred all the accursed lot, as they used to call us down
there--and when I drew in, behold there was the patronne standing behind
me looking on too. You have been here often enough to know how she roams
about the grounds and about the house, without a sound. A leaf doesn’t
pose itself lighter on the ground than her feet do. Well, I suppose she
didn’t know that I was upstairs, and came into the room just in her way
of always looking for something that isn’t there, and noticing me with
my head stuck out, naturally came up to see what I was looking at. Her
face wasn’t any paler than usual but she was clawing the dress over her
chest with her ten fingers--like this. I was confounded. Before I could
find my tongue she just turned round and went out with no more sound
than a shadow.”

When Peyrol ceased, the ringing of the church bell went on faintly and
then stopped as abruptly as it had begun.

“Talking about her shadow,” said the young officer indolently, “I know
her shadow.”

Old Peyrol made a really pronounced movement. “What do you mean?” he
asked. “Where?”

“I have got only one window in the room where they put me to sleep last
night and I stood at it looking out. That’s what I am here for--to look
out, am I not? I woke up suddenly, and being awake I went to the window
and looked out.”

“One doesn’t see shadows in the air,” growled old Peyrol.

“No, but you see them on the ground, pretty black too when the moon is
full. It fell across this open space here from the corner of the
house.”

“The patronne,” exclaimed Peyrol in a low voice, “impossible!”

“Does the old woman that lives in the kitchen roam, do the village women
roam as far as this?” asked the officer composedly. “You ought to know
the habits of the people. It was a woman’s shadow. The moon being to the
west, it glided slanting from that corner of the house and glided back
again. I know her shadow when I see it.”

“Did you hear anything?” asked Peyrol after a moment of visible
hesitation.

“The window being open, I heard somebody snoring. It couldn’t have been
you, you are too high. Moreover, from the snoring,” he added grimly, “it
must have been somebody with a good conscience. Not like you, old
skimmer of the seas, because, you know, that’s what you are, for all
your gunner’s warrant.” He glanced out of the corner of his eyes at old
Peyrol. “What makes you look so worried?”

“She roams, that cannot be denied,” murmured Peyrol, with an uneasiness
which he did not attempt to conceal.

“Evidently. I know a shadow when I see it, and when I saw it, it did not
frighten me, not a quarter as much as the mere tale of it seems to have
frightened you. However, that sans-culotte friend of yours must be a
hard sleeper. Those purveyors of the guillotine all have a first-class
fireproof Republican conscience. I have seen them at work up north when
I was a boy running bare-foot in the gutters....”

“The fellow always sleeps in that room,” said Peyrol earnestly.

“But that’s neither here nor there,” went on the officer, “except that
it may be convenient for roaming shadows to hear his conscience taking
its ease.”

Peyrol, excited, lowered his voice forcibly. “Lieutenant,” he said, “if
I had not seen from the first what was in your heart I would have
contrived to get rid of you a long time ago in some way or other.”

The lieutenant glanced sideways again and Peyrol let his raised fist
fall heavily on his thigh. “I am old Peyrol and this place, as lonely as
a ship at sea, is like a ship to me and all in it are like shipmates.
Never mind the patron. What I want to know is whether you heard
anything? Any sound at all? Murmur, footstep?” A bitterly mocking smile
touched the lips of the young man.

“Not a fairy footstep. Could you hear the fall of a leaf--and with that
terrorist cur trumpeting right above my head?...” Without unfolding his
arms he turned towards Peyrol, who was looking at him anxiously.... “You
want to know, do you? Well, I will tell you what I heard and you can
make the best of it. I heard the sound of a stumble. It wasn’t a fairy
either that stubbed its toe. It was something in a heavy shoe. Then a
stone went rolling down the ravine in front of us interminably, then a
silence as of death. I didn’t see anything moving. The way the moon was
then the ravine was in black shadow. And I didn’t try to see.”

Peyrol, with his elbow on his knee, leaned his head in the palm of his
hand. The officer repeated through his clenched teeth: “Make the best of
it.”

Peyrol shook his head slightly. After having spoken, the young officer
leaned back against the wall, but next moment the report of a piece of
ordnance reached them as it were from below, travelling around the
rising ground to the left in the form of a dull thud followed by a
sighing sound that seemed to seek an issue amongst the stony ridges and
rocks near by.

“That’s the English corvette which has been dodging in and out of Hyères
Roads for the last week,” said the young officer, picking up his sword
hastily. He stood up and buckled the belt on, while Peyrol rose more
deliberately from the bench, and said:

“She can’t be where we saw her at anchor last night. That gun was near.
She must have crossed over. There has been enough wind for that at
various times during the night. But what could she be firing at down
there in the Petite Passe? We had better go and see.”

He strode off, followed by Peyrol. There was not a human being in sight
about the farm and not a sound of life except for the lowing of a cow
coming faintly from behind a wall. Peyrol kept close behind the quickly
moving officer who followed the footpath marked faintly on the stony
slope of the hill.

“That gun was not shotted,” he observed suddenly in a deep steady voice.

The officer glanced over his shoulder.

“You may be right. You haven’t been a gunner for nothing. Not shotted,
eh? Then a signal gun. But who to? We have been observing that corvette
now for days and we know she has no companion.”

He moved on, Peyrol following him on the awkward path without losing his
wind and arguing in a steady voice: “She has no companion but she may
have seen a friend at daylight this morning.”

“Bah!” retorted the officer without checking his pace. “You talk now
like a child or else you take me for one. How far could she have seen?
What view could she have had at daylight if she was making her way to
the Petite Passe where she is now? Why, the islands would have masked
for her two-thirds of the sea and just in the direction too where the
English inshore squadron is hovering below the horizon. Funny blockade
that! You can’t see a single English sail for days and days together,
and then when you least expect them they come down all in a crowd as if
ready to eat us alive. No, no! There was no wind to bring her up a
companion. But tell me, gunner, you who boast of knowing the bark of
every English piece, what sort of gun was it?”

Peyrol growled in answer.

“Why, a twelve. The heaviest she carries. She is only a corvette.”

“Well, then, it was fired as a recall for one of her boats somewhere out
of sight along the shore. With a coast like this, all points and bights,
there would be nothing very extraordinary in that, would there?”

“No,” said Peyrol, stepping out steadily. “What is extraordinary is that
she should have had a boat away at all.”

“You are right there.” The officer stopped suddenly. “Yes, it is really
remarkable that she should have sent a boat away. And there is no other
way to explain that gun.”

Peyrol’s face expressed no emotion of any sort.

“There is something there worth investigating,” continued the officer
with animation.

“If it is a matter of a boat,” Peyrol said without the slightest
excitement, “there can be nothing very deep in it. What could there be?
As likely as not they sent her inshore early in the morning with lines
to try to catch some fish for the captain’s breakfast. Why do you open
your eyes like this? Don’t you know the English? They have enough cheek
for anything.”

After uttering those words with a deliberation made venerable by his
white hair, Peyrol made the gesture of wiping his brow, which was barely
moist.

“Let us push on,” said the lieutenant abruptly.

“Why hurry like this?” argued Peyrol without moving. “Those heavy clogs
of mine are not adapted for scrambling on loose stones.”

“Aren’t they?” burst out the officer. “Well then, if you are tired you
can sit down and fan yourself with your hat. Good-bye.” And he strode
away before Peyrol could utter a word.

The path following the contour of the hill took a turn towards its
sea-face and very soon the lieutenant passed out of sight with startling
suddenness. Then his head reappeared for a moment, only his head, and
that too vanished suddenly. Peyrol remained perplexed. After gazing in
the direction in which the officer had disappeared, he looked down at
the farm buildings, now below him but not at a very great distance. He
could see distinctly the pigeons walking on the roof ridges. Somebody
was drawing water from the well in the middle of the yard. The patron,
no doubt; but that man, who at one time had the power to send so many
luckless persons to their death, did not count for old Peyrol. He had
even ceased to be an offence to his sight and a disturber of his
feelings. By himself he was nothing. He had never been anything but a
creature of the universal blood-lust of the time. The very doubts about
him had died out by now in old Peyrol’s breast. The fellow was so
insignificant that had Peyrol in a moment of particular attention
discovered that he cast no shadow, he would not have been surprised.
Below there he was reduced to the shape of a dwarf lugging a bucket away
from the well. But where was she? Peyrol asked himself, shading his eyes
with his hand. He knew that the patronne could not be very far away,
because he had a sight of her during the morning; but that was before he
had learned she had taken to roaming at night. His growing uneasiness
came suddenly to an end when, turning his eyes away from the
farm-buildings, where obviously she was not, he saw her appear, with
nothing but the sky full of light at her back, coming down round the
very turn of the path which had taken the lieutenant out of sight.

Peyrol moved briskly towards her. He wasn’t a man to lose time in idle
wonder, and his sabots did not seem to weigh heavy on his feet. The
fermière, whom the villagers down there spoke of as Arlette as though
she had been a little girl, but in a strange tone of shocked awe, walked
with her head drooping and her feet (as Peyrol used to say) touching the
ground as lightly as falling leaves. The clatter of the clogs made her
raise her black, clear eyes that had been smitten on the very verge of
womanhood by such sights of bloodshed and terror as to leave in her a
fear of looking steadily in any direction for long, lest she should see
coming through the empty air some mutilated vision of the dead. Peyrol
called it trying not to see something that was not there; and this
evasive yet frank mobility was so much a part of her being that the
steadiness with which she met his inquisitive glance surprised old
Peyrol for a moment. He asked without beating about the bush:

“Did he speak to you?”

She answered with something airy and provoking in her voice, which also
struck Peyrol as a novelty: “He never stopped. He passed by as though he
had not seen me”--and then they both looked away from each other.

“Now, what is it you took into your head to watch for at night?”

She did not expect that question. She hung her head and took a pleat of
her skirt between her fingers, embarrassed like a child.

“Why should I not,” she murmured in a low shy note, as if she had two
voices within her.

“What did Catherine say?”

“She was asleep, or perhaps only lying on her back with her eyes shut.”

“Does she do that?” asked Peyrol with incredulity.

“Yes.” Arlette gave Peyrol a queer, meaningless smile with which her
eyes had nothing to do. “Yes, she often does. I have noticed that
before. She lies there trembling under her blankets till I come back.”

“What drove you out last night?” Peyrol tried to catch her eyes, but
they eluded him in the usual way. And now her face looked as though it
couldn’t smile.

“My heart,” she said. For a moment Peyrol lost his tongue and even all
power of motion. The fermière having lowered her eyelids, all her life
seemed to have gone into her coral lips, vivid and without a quiver in
the perfection of their design, and Peyrol, giving up the conversation
with an upward fling of his arm, hurried up the path without looking
behind him. But once round the turn of the path, he approached the
lookout at an easier gait. It was a piece of smooth ground below the
summit of the hill. It had quite a pronounced slope, so that a short and
robust pine growing true out of the soil yet leaned well over the edge
of the sheer drop of some fifty feet or so. The first thing that
Peyrol’s eyes took in was the water of the Petite Passe with the
enormous shadow of the Porquerolles Island darkening more than half of
its width at this still early hour. He could not see the whole of it,
but on the part his glance embraced there was no ship of any kind. The
lieutenant, leaning with his chest along the inclined pine, addressed
him irritably.

“Squat! Do you think there are no glasses on board the Englishman?”

Peyrol obeyed without a word and for the space of a minute or so
presented the bizarre sight of a rather bulky peasant with venerable
white locks crawling on his hands and knees on a hillside for no visible
reason. When he got to the foot of the pine he raised himself on his
knees. The lieutenant, flattened against the inclined trunk and with a
pocket glass glued to his eye, growled angrily:

“You can see her now, can’t you?”

Peyrol in his kneeling position could see the ship now. She was less
than a quarter of a mile from him up the coast, almost within hailing
effort of his powerful voice. His unaided eyes could follow the
movements of the men on board like dark dots about her decks. She had
drifted so far within Cape Esterel that the low projecting mass of it
seemed to be in actual contact with her stern. Her unexpected nearness
made Peyrol draw a sharp breath through his teeth. The lieutenant
murmured, still keeping the glass to his eye:

“I can see the very epaulettes of the officers on the quarter-deck.”




V


As Peyrol and the lieutenant had surmised from the report of the gun,
the English ship which the evening before was lying in Hyères Roads had
got under way after dark. The light airs had taken her as far as the
Petite Passe in the early part of the night, and then had abandoned her
to the breathless moonlight in which, bereft of all motion, she looked
more like a white monument of stone dwarfed by the darkling masses of
land on either hand than a fabric famed for its swiftness in attack or
in flight.

Her captain was a man of about forty, with clean-shaven, full cheeks and
mobile thin lips which he had a trick of compressing mysteriously before
he spoke and sometimes also at the end of his speeches. He was alert in
his movements and nocturnal in his habits.

Directly he found that the calm had taken complete possession of the
night and was going to last for hours Captain Vincent assumed his
favourite attitude of leaning over the rail. It was then some time after
midnight and in the pervading stillness the moon, riding on a speckless
sky, seemed to pour her enchantment on an uninhabited planet. Captain
Vincent did not mind the moon very much. Of course it made his ship
visible from both shores of the Petite Passe. But after nearly a year of
constant service in command of the extreme lookout ship of Admiral
Nelson’s blockading fleet he knew the emplacement of almost every gun
of the shore defences. Where the breeze had left him he was safe from
the biggest gun of the few that were mounted on Porquerolles. On the
Giens side of the pass he knew for certain there was not even a popgun
mounted anywhere. His long familiarity with that part of the coast had
imbued him with the belief that he knew the habits of its population
thoroughly. The gleams of light in their houses went out very early, and
Captain Vincent felt convinced that they were all in their beds,
including the gunners of the batteries who belonged to the local
militia. Their interest in the movements of H.M.’s twenty-two gun sloop
_Amelia_ had grown stale by custom. She never interfered with their
private affairs, and allowed the small coasting craft to go to and fro
unmolested. They would have wondered if she had been more than two days
away. Captain Vincent used to say grimly that the Hyères Roadstead had
become like a second home to him.

For an hour or so Captain Vincent mused a bit on his real home, on
matters of service and other unrelated things, then getting into motion
in a very wide-awake manner, he superintended himself the dispatch of
that boat the existence of which had been acutely surmised by Lieutenant
Réal and was a matter of no doubt whatever to old Peyrol. As to her
mission, it had nothing to do with catching fish for the captain’s
breakfast. It was the captain’s own gig, a very fast pulling boat. She
was already alongside with her crew in her when the officer, who was
going in charge, was beckoned to by the captain. He had a cutlass at his
side and a brace of pistols in his belt, and there was a business-like
air about him that showed he had been on such service before.

“This calm will last a good many hours,” said the captain. “In this
tideless sea you are certain to find the ship very much where she is
now, but closer in shore. The attraction of the land--you know.”

“Yes, sir. The land does attract.”

“Yes. Well, she may be allowed to put her side against any of these
rocks. There would be no more danger than alongside a quay with a sea
like this. Just look at the water in the pass, Mr. Bolt. Like the floor
of a ballroom. Pull close along shore when you return. I’ll expect you
back at dawn.”

Captain Vincent paused suddenly. A doubt crossed his mind as to the
wisdom of this nocturnal expedition. The hammer-head of the peninsula
with its sea-face invisible from both sides of the coast was an ideal
spot for a secret landing. Its lonely character appealed to his
imagination, which in the first instance had been stimulated by a chance
remark of Mr. Bolt himself.

The fact was that the week before, when the Amelia was cruising off the
peninsula, Bolt, looking at the coast, mentioned that he knew that part
of it well; he had actually been ashore there a good many years ago,
while serving with Lord Howe’s fleet. He described the nature of the
path, the aspect of a little village on the reverse slope, and had much
to say about a certain farmhouse where he had been more than once, and
had even stayed for twenty-four hours at a time on more than one
occasion.

This had aroused Captain Vincent’s curiosity. He sent for Bolt and had
a long conversation with him. He listened with great interest to Bolt’s
story, how one day a man was seen from the deck of the ship in which
Bolt was serving then, waving a white sheet or tablecloth amongst the
rocks at the water’s edge. It might have been a trap; but, as the man
seemed alone and the shore was within range of the ship’s guns, a boat
was sent to take him off.

“And that, sir,” Bolt pursued impressively, “was, I verily believe, the
very first communication that Lord Howe had from the royalists in
Toulon.” Afterwards Bolt described to Captain Vincent the meetings of
the Toulon royalists with the officers of the fleet. From the back of
the farm he, Bolt himself, had often watched for hours the entrance of
the Toulon harbour on the lookout for the boat bringing over the
royalist emissaries. Then he would make an agreed signal to the advanced
squadron and some English officers would land on their side and meet the
Frenchmen at the farmhouse. It was as simple as that. The people of the
farmhouse, husband and wife, were well-to-do, good class altogether, and
staunch royalists. He had got to know them well.

Captain Vincent wondered whether the same people were still living
there. Bolt could see no reason why they shouldn’t be. It wasn’t more
than ten years ago, and they were by no means an old couple. As far as
he could make out, the farm was their own property. He, Bolt, knew only
very few French words at that time. It was much later, after he had been
made a prisoner and kept inland in France till the Peace of Amiens, that
he had picked up a smattering of the lingo. His captivity had done away
with his feeble chance of promotion, he could not help remarking. Bolt
was a master’s mate still.

Captain Vincent, in common with a good many officers of all ranks in
Lord Nelson’s fleet, had his misgivings about the system of distant
blockade from which the Admiral apparently would not depart. Yet one
could not blame Lord Nelson. Everybody in the fleet understood that what
was in his mind was the destruction of the enemy; and if the enemy was
closely blockaded he would never come out to be destroyed. On the other
hand it was clear that as things were conducted the French had too many
chances left them to slip out unobserved and vanish from all human
knowledge for months. Those possibilities were a constant worry to
Captain Vincent, who had thrown himself with the ardour of passion into
the special duty with which he was entrusted. Oh, for a pair of eyes
fastened night and day on the entrance of the harbour of Toulon! Oh, for
the power to look at the very state of French ships and into the very
secrets of French minds!

But he said nothing of this to Bolt. He only observed that the character
of the French Government was changed and that the minds of the royalist
people in the farmhouse might have changed too, since they had got back
the exercise of their religion. Bolt’s answer was that he had had a lot
to do with royalists, in his time, on board Lord Howe’s fleet, both
before and after Toulon was evacuated. All sorts, men and women, barbers
and noblemen, sailors and tradesmen; almost every kind of royalist one
could think of; and his opinion was that a royalist never changed. As to
the place itself, he only wished the captain had seen it. It was the
sort of spot that nothing could change. He made bold to say that it
would be just the same a hundred years hence.

The earnestness of his officer caused Captain Vincent to look hard at
him. He was a man of about his own age, but while Vincent was a
comparatively young captain, Bolt was an old master’s mate. Each
understood the other perfectly. Captain Vincent fidgeted for a while and
then observed abstractedly that he was not a man to put a noose round a
dog’s neck, let alone a good seaman’s.

This cryptic pronouncement caused no wonder to appear in Bolt’s
attentive gaze. He only became a little thoughtful before he said in the
same abstracted tone that an officer in uniform was not likely to be
hanged for a spy. The service was risky, of course. It was necessary,
for its success, that, assuming the same people were there, it should be
undertaken by a man well known to the inhabitants. Then he added that he
was certain of being recognized. And while he enlarged on the extremely
good terms he had been on with the owners of the farm, especially the
farmer’s wife, a comely motherly woman, who had been very kind to him,
and had all her wits about her, Captain Vincent, looking at the master’s
mate’s bushy whiskers, thought that these in themselves were enough to
ensure recognition. This impression was so strong that he had asked
point-blank: “You haven’t altered the growth of the hair on your face,
Mr. Bolt, since then?”

There was just a touch of indignation in Bolt’s negative reply; for he
was proud of his whiskers. He declared he was ready to take the most
desperate chances for the service of his king and his country.

Captain Vincent added: “For the sake of Lord Nelson, too.” One
understood well what his Lordship wished to bring about by that blockade
at sixty leagues off. He was talking to a sailor, and there was no need
to say any more. Did Bolt think that he could persuade those people to
conceal him in their house on that lonely shore end of the peninsula for
some considerable time? Bolt thought it was the easiest thing in the
world. He would simply go up there and renew the old acquaintance, but
he did not mean to do that in a reckless manner. It would have to be
done at night, when of course there would be no one about. He would land
just where he used to before, wrapped up in a Mediterranean sailor’s
cloak--he had one of his own--over his uniform, and simply go straight
to the door, at which he would knock. Ten to one the farmer himself
would come down to open it. He knew enough French by now, he hoped, to
persuade those people to conceal him in some room having a view in the
right direction; and there he would stick day after day on the watch,
taking a little exercise in the middle of the night, ready to live on
mere bread and water if necessary, so as not to arouse suspicion amongst
the farmhands. And who knows if, with the farmer’s help, he could not
get some news of what was going on actually within the port. Then from
time to time he could go down in the dead of night, signal to the ship
and make his report. Bolt expressed the hope that the _Amelia_ would
remain as much as possible in sight of the coast. It would cheer him up
to see her about. Captain Vincent naturally assented. He pointed out to
Bolt, however, that his post would become most important exactly when
the ship had been chased away or driven by the weather off her station,
as could very easily happen. “You would be then the eyes of Lord
Nelson’s fleet, Mr. Bolt--think of that. The actual eyes of Lord
Nelson’s fleet!”

After dispatching his officer, Captain Vincent spent the night on deck.
The break of day came at last, much paler than the moonlight which it
replaced. And still no boat. And again Captain Vincent asked himself if
he had not acted indiscreetly. Impenetrable, and looking as fresh as if
he had just come up on deck, he argued the point with himself till the
rising sun clearing the ridge on Porquerolles Island flashed its level
rays upon his ship with her dew-darkened sails and dripping rigging. He
roused himself then to tell his first lieutenant to get the boats out to
tow the ship away from the shore. The report of the gun he ordered to be
fired expressed simply his irritation. The _Amelia_, pointing towards
the middle of the Passe, was moving at a snail’s pace behind her string
of boats. Minutes passed. And then suddenly Captain Vincent perceived
his boat pulling back in shore according to orders. When nearly abreast
of the ship, she darted away, making for her side. Mr. Bolt clambered on
board, alone, ordering the gig to go ahead and help with the towing.
Captain Vincent, standing apart on the quarter-deck, received him with a
grimly questioning look.

Mr. Bolt’s first words were to the effect that he believed the
confounded spot to be bewitched. Then he glanced at the group of
officers on the other side of the quarter-deck. Captain Vincent led the
way to his cabin. There he turned and looked at his officer, who, with
an air of distraction, mumbled: “There are night-walkers there.”

“Come, Bolt, what the devil have you seen? Did you get near the house at
all?”

“I got within twenty yards of the door, sir,” said Bolt. And encouraged
by the captain’s much less ferocious--“Well?” began his tale. He did not
pull up to the path which he knew, but to a little bit of beach on which
he told his men to haul up the boat and wait for him. The beach was
concealed by a thick growth of bushes on the landward side and by some
rocks from the sea. Then he went to what he called the ravine, still
avoiding the path, so that as a matter of fact he made his way up on his
hands and knees mostly, very carefully and slowly amongst the loose
stones, till by holding on to a bush he brought his eyes on a level with
the piece of flat ground in front of the farmhouse.

The familiar aspect of the buildings, totally unchanged from the time
when he had played his part in what appeared as a most successful
operation at the beginning of the war, inspired Bolt with great
confidence in the success of his present enterprise, vague as it was,
but the great charm of which lay, no doubt, in mental associations with
his younger years. Nothing seemed easier than to stride across the forty
yards of open ground and rouse the farmer whom he remembered so well,
the well-to-do man, a grave, sagacious royalist in his humble way;
certainly, in Bolt’s view, no traitor to his country, and preserving so
well his dignity in ambiguous circumstances. To Bolt’s simple vision
neither that man nor his wife could have changed.

In this view of Arlette’s parents Bolt was influenced by the
consciousness of there having been no change in himself. He was the same
Jack Bolt, and everything around him was the same as if he had left the
spot only yesterday. Already he saw himself in the kitchen which he knew
so well, seated by the light of a single candle before a glass of wine
and talking his best French to that worthy farmer of sound principles.
The whole thing was as well as done. He imagined himself a secret inmate
of that building, closely confined indeed, but sustained by the possible
great results of his watchfulness, in many ways more comfortable than on
board the _Amelia_ and with the glorious consciousness that he was, in
Captain Vincent’s phrase, the actual physical eyes of the Fleet.

He didn’t, of course, talk of his private feelings to Captain Vincent.
All those thoughts and emotions were compressed in the space of not much
more than a minute or two while, holding on with one hand to his bush
and having got a good foothold for one of his feet, he indulged in that
pleasant anticipatory sense of success. In the old days the farmer’s
wife used to be a light sleeper. The farmhands which, he remembered,
lived in the village or were distributed in stables and outhouses, did
not give him any concern. He wouldn’t need to knock heavily. He pictured
to himself the farmer’s wife sitting up in bed, listening, then rousing
her husband, who, as likely as not, would take the gun standing against
the dresser downstairs and come to the door.

And then everything would be all right.... But perhaps ... yes! It was
just as likely the farmer would simply open the window and hold a
parley. That really was most likely. Naturally. In his place Bolt felt
he would do that very thing. Yes, that was what a man in a lonely house,
in the middle of the night, would do most naturally. And he imagined
himself whispering mysteriously his answers up the wall to the obvious
questions--“Ami”--“Bolt”--“Ouvrez-moi”--“vive le roi”--or things of that
sort. And in sequence to those vivid images it occurred to Bolt that the
best thing he could do would be to throw small stones against the window
shutter, the sort of sound most likely to rouse a light sleeper. He
wasn’t quite sure which window on the floor above the ground floor was
that of those people’s bedroom, but there were anyhow only three of
them. In a moment he would have sprung up from his foothold on to the
level if, raising his eyes for another look at the front of the house,
he had not perceived that one of the windows was already open. How he
could have failed to notice that before, he couldn’t explain.

He confessed to Captain Vincent in the course of his narrative that
“this open window, sir, checked me dead. In fact, sir, it shook my
confidence, for you know, sir, that no native of these parts would dream
of sleeping with his window open. It struck me that there was something
wrong there; and I remained where I was.”

That fascination of repose, of secretive friendliness, which houses
present at night, was gone. By the power of an open window, a black
square in the moon-lighted wall, the farmhouse took on the aspect of a
man-trap. Bolt assured Captain Vincent that the window would not have
stopped him; he would have gone on all the same, though with an
uncertain mind. But while he was thinking it out there glided without a
sound before his irresolute eyes from somewhere a white vision--a woman.
He could see her black hair flowing down her back. A woman whom anybody
would have been excused for taking for a ghost. “I won’t say that she
froze my blood, sir, but she made me cold all over for a moment. Lots of
people have seen ghosts, at least they say so, and I have an open mind
about that. She was a weird thing to look at in the moonlight. She did
not act like a sleep-walker either. If she had not come out of a grave,
then she had jumped out of bed. But when she stole back and hid herself
round the corner of the house I knew she was not a ghost. She could not
have seen me. There she stood in the black shadow watching for
something--or waiting for somebody,” added Bolt in a grim tone. “She
looked crazy,” he conceded charitably.

One thing was clear to him: there had been changes in that farmhouse
since his time. Bolt resented them, as if that time had been only last
week. The woman concealed round the corner remained in his full view,
watchful, as if only waiting for him to show himself in the open, to run
off screeching and rouse all the countryside. Bolt came quickly to the
conclusion that he must withdraw from the slope. On lowering himself
from his first position he had the misfortune to dislodge a stone. This
circumstance precipitated his retreat. In a very few minutes he found
himself by the shore. He paused to listen. Above him, up the ravine and
all round amongst the rocks, everything was perfectly still. He walked
along in the direction of his boat. There was nothing for it but to get
away quietly and perhaps....

“Yes, Mr. Bolt, I fear we shall have to give up our plan,” interrupted
Captain Vincent at that point. Bolt’s assent came reluctantly, and then
he braced himself to confess that this was not the worst. Before the
astonished face of Captain Vincent he hastened to blurt it out. He was
very sorry, he could in no way account for it, but--he had lost a man.

Captain Vincent seemed unable to believe his ears. “What do you say?
Lost a man out of my boat’s crew!” He was profoundly shocked. Bolt was
correspondingly distressed. He narrated that, shortly after he had left
them, the seamen had heard, or imagined they had heard, some faint and
peculiar noises somewhere within the cove. The coxswain sent one of the
men, the oldest of the boat’s crew, along the shore to ascertain whether
their boat hauled on the beach could be seen from the other side of the
cove. The man--it was Symons--departed crawling on his hands and knees
to make the circuit and, well--he had not returned. This was really the
reason why the boat was so late in getting back to the ship. Of course
Bolt did not like to give up the man. It was inconceivable that Symons
should have deserted. He had left his cutlass behind and was completely
unarmed, but had he been suddenly pounced upon he surely would have been
able to let out a yell that could have been heard all over the cove. But
till daybreak a profound stillness, in which it seemed a whisper could
have been heard for miles, had reigned over the coast. It was as if
Symons had been spirited away by some supernatural means, without a
scuffle, without a cry. For it was inconceivable that he should have
ventured inland and got captured there. It was equally inconceivable
that there should have been on that particular night men ready to
pounce upon Symons and knock him on the head so neatly as not to let him
give a groan even.

Captain Vincent said: “All this is very fantastical, Mr. Bolt,” and
compressed his lips firmly for a moment before he continued: “But not
much more than your woman. I suppose you did see something real....”

“I tell you, sir, she stood there in full moonlight for ten minutes
within a stone’s throw of me,” protested Bolt with a sort of
desperation. “She seemed to have jumped out of bed only to look at the
house. If she had a petticoat over her night-shift, that was all. Her
back was to me. When she moved away I could not make out her face
properly. Then she went to stand in the shadow of the house.”

“On the watch,” suggested Captain Vincent.

“Looked like it, sir,” confessed Bolt.

“So there must have been somebody about,” concluded Captain Vincent with
assurance.

Bolt murmured a reluctant, “Must have been.” He had expected to get into
enormous trouble over this affair and was much relieved by the captain’s
quiet attitude. “I hope, sir, you approve of my conduct in not
attempting to look for Symons at once?”

“Yes. You acted prudently by not advancing inland,” said the captain.

“I was afraid of spoiling our chances to carry out your plan, sir, by
disclosing our presence on shore. And that could not have been avoided.
Moreover, we were only five in all and not properly armed.”

“The plan has gone down before your night-walker, Mr. Bolt,” Captain
Vincent declared dryly. “But we must try to find out what has become of
our man if it can be done without risking too much.”

“By landing a large party this very next night we could surround the
house,” Bolt suggested. “If we find friends there, well and good. If
enemies, then we could carry off some of them on board for exchange
perhaps. I am almost sorry I did not go back and kidnap that
wench--whoever she was,” he added recklessly. “Ah! if it had only been a
man!”

“No doubt there was a man not very far off,” said Captain Vincent
equably. “That will do, Mr. Bolt. You had better go and get some rest
now.”

Bolt was glad to obey, for he was tired and hungry after his dismal
failure. What vexed him most was its absurdity. Captain Vincent, though
he too had passed a sleepless night, felt too restless to remain below.
He followed his officer on deck.




VI


By that time the _Amelia_ had been towed half a mile or so away from
Cape Esterel. This change had brought her nearer to the two watchers on
the hill-side who would have been plainly visible to the people on her
deck, but for the head of the pine which concealed their movements.
Lieutenant Réal, bestriding the rugged trunk as high as he could get,
had the whole of the English ship’s deck open to the range of his
pocket-glass which he used between the branches. He said to Peyrol
suddenly:

“Her captain has just come on deck.”

Peyrol, sitting at the foot of the tree, made no answer for a long
while. A warm drowsiness lay over the land and seemed to press down his
eyelids. But inwardly the old rover was intensely awake. Under the mask
of his immobility, with half-shut eyes and idly clasped hands, he heard
the lieutenant, perched up there near the head of the tree, mutter
counting something: “One, two, three,” and then a loud “Parbleu!” after
which the lieutenant in his trunk-bestriding attitude began to jerk
himself backwards. Peyrol got up out of his way, but could not restrain
himself from asking: “What’s the matter now?”

“I will tell you what’s the matter,” said the other, excitedly. As soon
as he got his footing he walked up to old Peyrol and when quite close
to him folded his arms across his chest.

“The first thing I did was to count the boats in the water. There was
not a single one left on board. And now I just counted them again and
found one more there. That ship had a boat out last night. How I missed
seeing her pull out from under the land I don’t know. I was watching the
decks, I suppose, and she seems to have gone straight up to the
tow-rope. But I was right. That Englishman had a boat out.”

He seized Peyrol by both shoulders suddenly. “I believe you knew it all
the time. You knew it, I tell you.” Peyrol, shaken violently by the
shoulders, raised his eyes to look at the angry face within a few inches
of his own. In his worn gaze there was no fear or shame, but a troubled
perplexity and obvious concern. He remained passive, merely
remonstrating softly:

“Doucement. Doucement.”

The lieutenant suddenly desisted with a final jerk which failed to
stagger old Peyrol, who, directly he had been released, assumed an
explanatory tone.

“For the ground is slippery here. If I had lost my footing I would not
have been able to prevent myself from grabbing at you, and we would have
gone down that cliff together; which would have told those Englishmen
more than twenty boats could have found out in as many nights.”

Secretly Lieutenant Réal was daunted by Peyrol’s mildness. It could not
be shaken. Even physically he had an impression of the utter futility of
his effort, as though he had tried to shake a rock. He threw himself on
the ground, carelessly saying:

“As for instance?”

Peyrol lowered himself with a deliberation appropriate to his grey
hairs. “You don’t suppose that out of a hundred and twenty or so pairs
of eyes on board that ship there wouldn’t be a dozen at least scanning
the shore. Two men falling down a cliff would have been a startling
sight. The English would have been interested enough to send a boat
ashore to go through our pockets, and whether dead or only half dead we
wouldn’t have been in a state to prevent them. It wouldn’t matter so
much as to me, and I don’t know what papers you may have in your
pockets, but there are your shoulder straps, your uniform coat.”

“I carry no papers in my pocket, and....” A sudden thought seemed to
strike the lieutenant, a thought so intense and far-fetched as to give
his mental effort a momentary aspect of vacancy. He shook it off and
went on in a changed tone: “The shoulder straps would not have been much
of a revelation by themselves.”

“No. Not much. But enough to let her captain know that he had been
watched. For what else could the dead body of a naval officer with a
spyglass in his pocket mean? Hundreds of eyes may glance carelessly at
that ship every day from all parts of the coast, though I fancy those
landsmen hardly take the trouble to look at her now. But that’s a very
different thing from being kept under observation. However, I don’t
suppose all this matters much.”

The lieutenant was recovering from the spell of that sudden thought.
“Papers in my pocket,” he muttered to himself. “That would be a perfect
way.” His parted lips came together in a slightly sarcastic smile with
which he met Peyrol’s puzzled, sidelong glance provoked by the
inexplicable character of these words.

“I bet,” said the lieutenant, “that ever since I came here first you
have been more or less worrying your old head about my motives and
intentions.”

Peyrol said simply: “You came here on service at first and afterwards
you came again because even in the Toulon fleet an officer may get a few
days’ leave. As to your intentions, I won’t say anything about them.
Especially as regards myself. About ten minutes ago anybody looking on
would have thought they were not friendly to me.”

The lieutenant sat up suddenly. By that time the English sloop, getting
away from under the land, had become visible even from the spot on which
they sat.

“Look!” exclaimed Réal. “She seems to be forging ahead in this calm.”

Peyrol, startled, raised his eyes and saw the Amelia clear of the edge
of the cliff and heading across the Passe. All her boats were already
alongside, and yet, as a minute or two of steady gazing was enough to
convince Peyrol, she was not stationary.

“She moves! There is no denying that. She moves. Watch the white speck
of that house on Porquerolles. There! The end of her jibboom touches it
now. In a moment her head sails will mask it to us.”

“I would never have believed it,” muttered the lieutenant, after a pause
of intent gazing. “And look, Peyrol, look, there is not a wrinkle on the
water.”

Peyrol, who had been shading his eyes from the sun, let his hand fall.
“Yes,” he said, “she would answer to a child’s breath quicker than a
feather, and the English very soon found it out when they got her. She
was caught in Genoa only a few months after I came home and got my
moorings here.”

“I didn’t know,” murmured the young man.

“Aha, lieutenant,” said Peyrol, pressing his finger to his breast, “it
hurts here, doesn’t it? There is nobody but good Frenchmen here. Do you
think it is a pleasure to me to watch that flag out there at her peak?
Look, you can see the whole of her now. Look at her ensign hanging down
as if there were not a breath of wind under the heavens....” He stamped
his foot suddenly. “And yet she moves! Those in Toulon that may be
thinking of catching her dead or alive would have to think hard and make
long plans and get good men to carry them out.”

“There was some talk of it at the Toulon Admiralty,” said Réal.

The rover shook his head. “They need not have sent you on the duty,” he
said. “I have been watching her now for a month, her and the man who has
got her now. I know all his tricks and all his habits and all his dodges
by this time. The man is a seaman, that must be said for him, but I can
tell beforehand what he will do in any given case.”

Lieutenant Réal lay down on his back again, his clasped hands under his
head. He thought that this old man was not boasting. He knew a lot about
the English ship, and if an attempt to capture her was to be made, his
ideas would be worth having. Nevertheless, in his relations with old
Peyrol Lieutenant Réal suffered from contradictory feelings. Réal was
the son of a ci-devant couple--small provincial gentry--who both had
lost their heads on the scaffold within the same week. As to their boy,
he was apprenticed by order of the Delegate of the Revolutionary
Committee of his town to a poor but pure-minded joiner, who could not
provide him with shoes to run his errands in, but treated this
aristocrat not unkindly. Nevertheless, at the end of the year the orphan
ran away and volunteered as a boy on board one of the ships of the
Republic about to sail on a distant expedition. At sea he found another
standard of values. In the course of some eight years, suppressing his
faculties of love and hatred, he arrived at the rank of an officer by
sheer merit, and had accustomed himself to look at men sceptically,
without much scorn or much respect. His principles were purely
professional and he had never formed a friendship in his life--more
unfortunate in that respect than old Peyrol, who at least had known the
bonds of the lawless Brotherhood of the Coast. He was, of course, very
self-contained. Peyrol, whom he had found unexpectedly settled on the
peninsula, was the first human being to break through that schooled
reserve which the precariousness of all things had forced on the orphan
of the Revolution. Peyrol’s striking personality had aroused Réal’s
interest, a mistrustful liking mixed with some contempt of a purely
doctrinaire kind. It was clear that the fellow had been next thing to a
pirate at one time or another--a sort of past which could not commend
itself to a naval officer.

Still, Peyrol had broken through: and, presently, the peculiarities of
all those people at the farm, each individual one of them, had entered
through the breach.

Lieutenant Réal, on his back, closing his eyes to the glare of the sky,
meditated on old Peyrol, while Peyrol himself, with his white head bare
in the sunshine, seemed to be sitting by the side of a corpse. What in
that man impressed Lieutenant Réal was the faculty of shrewd insight.
The facts of Réal’s connection with the farmhouse on the peninsula were
much as Peyrol had stated. First on specific duty about establishing a
signal station, then, when that project had been given up, voluntary
visits. Not belonging to any ship of the fleet but doing shore duty at
the Arsenal, Lieutenant Réal had spent several periods of short leave at
the farm, where indeed nobody could tell whether he had come on duty or
on leave. He personally could not--or perhaps would not--tell even to
himself why it was that he came there. He had been growing sick of his
work. He had no place in the world to go to, and no one either. Was it
Peyrol he was coming to see? A mute, strangely suspicious, defiant
understanding had established itself imperceptibly between him and that
lawless old man who might have been suspected to have come there only to
die, if the whole robust personality of Peyrol with its quiet vitality
had not been antagonistic to the notion of death. That rover behaved as
though he had all the time in the world at his command.

Peyrol spoke suddenly, with his eyes fixed in front of him as if he were
addressing the Island of Porquerolles, eight miles away.

“Yes--I know all her moves, though I must say that this trick of dodging
close to our peninsula is something new.”

“H’m! Fish for the captain’s breakfast,” mumbled Réal without opening
his eyes. “Where is she now?”

“In the middle of the Passe, busy hoisting in her boats. And still
moving! That ship will keep her way as long as the flame of a candle on
her deck will not stand upright.”

“That ship is a marvel.”

“She has been built by French shipwrights,” said old Peyrol bitterly.

This was the last sound for a long time. Then the lieutenant said in an
indifferent tone: “You are very positive about that. How do you know?”

“I have been looking at her for a month, whatever name she might have
had or whatever name the English call her by now. Did you ever see such
a bow on an English-built ship?”

The lieutenant remained silent, as though he had lost all interest and
there had been no such thing as an English man-of-war within a mile. But
all the time he was thinking hard. He had been told confidentially of a
certain piece of service to be performed on instructions received from
Paris. Not an operation of war, but service of the greatest importance.
The risk of it was not so much deadly as particularly odious. A brave
man might well have shrunk from it; and there are risks (not death) from
which a resolute man might shrink without shame.

“Have you ever tasted of prison, Peyrol?” he asked suddenly, in an
affectedly sleepy voice.

It roused Peyrol nearly into a shout. “Heavens! No! Prison! What do you
mean by prison?... I have been a captive to savages,” he added, calming
down, “but that’s a very old story. I was young and foolish then. Later,
when a grown man, I was a slave to the famous Ali-Kassim. I spent a
fortnight with chains on my legs and arms in the yard of a mud fort on
the shores of the Persian Gulf. There was nearly a score of us Brothers
of the Coast in the same predicament ... in consequence of a shipwreck.”

“Yes....” The lieutenant was very languid indeed.... “And I dare say you
all took service with that bloodthirsty old pirate.”

“There was not a single one of his thousands of blackamoors that could
lay a gun properly. But Ali-Kassim made war like a prince. We sailed, a
regular fleet, across the gulf, took a town on the coast of Arabia
somewhere, and looted it. Then I and the others managed to get hold of
an armed dhow, and we fought our way right through the blackamoors’
fleet. Several of us died of thirst later. All the same, it was a great
affair. But don’t you talk to me of prisons. A proper man if given a
chance to fight can always get himself killed. You understand me?”

“Yes, I understand you,” drawled the lieutenant. “I think I know you
pretty well. I suppose an English prison....”

“That is a horrible subject of conversation,” interrupted Peyrol in a
loud, emotional tone. “Naturally, any death is better than a prison. Any
death! What is it you have in your mind, lieutenant?”

“Oh, it isn’t that I want you to die,” drawled Réal in an uninterested
manner.

Peyrol, his entwined fingers clasping his legs, gazed fixedly at the
English sloop floating idly in the Passe while he gave up all his mind
to the consideration of these words that had floated out, idly too, into
the peace and silence of the morning. Then he asked in a low tone:

“Do you want to frighten me?”

The lieutenant laughed harshly. Neither by word, gesture nor glance did
Peyrol acknowledge the enigmatic and unpleasant sound. But when it
ceased the silence grew so oppressive between the two men that they got
up by a common impulse. The lieutenant sprang to his feet lightly. The
uprising of Peyrol took more time and had more dignity. They stood side
by side unable to detach their longing eyes from the enemy ship below
their feet.

“I wonder why he put himself into this curious position,” said the
officer.

“I wonder?” growled Peyrol curtly. “If there had been only a couple of
eighteen-pounders placed on the rocky ledge to the left of us, we could
have unrigged her in about ten minutes.”

“Good old gunner,” commented Réal ironically. “And what afterwards? Swim
off, you and I, with our cutlasses in our teeth and take her by
boarding, what?”

This sally provoked in Peyrol an austere smile. “No! No!” he protested
soberly. “But why not let Toulon know? Bring out a frigate or two and
catch him alive. Many a time have I planned his capture just to ease my
heart. Often I have stared at night out of my window upstairs across the
bay to where I knew he was lying at anchor, and thinking of a little
surprise I could arrange for him if I were not only old Peyrol, the
gunner.”

“Yes. And keeping out of the way at that, with a bad note against his
name in the books of the Admiralty in Toulon.”

“You can’t say I have tried to hide myself from you who are a naval
officer,” struck in Peyrol quickly. “I fear no man. I did not run. I
simply went away from Toulon. Nobody had given me an order to stay
there. And you can’t say I ran very far either.”

“That was the cleverest move of all. You knew what you were doing.”

“Here you go again, hinting at something crooked like that fellow with
big epaulettes at the Port Office that seemed to be longing to put me
under arrest just because I brought a prize from the Indian Ocean, eight
thousand miles, dodging clear of every Englishman that came in my way,
which was more perhaps than he could have done. I have my gunner’s
warrant signed by Citizen Renaud, a chef d’escadre. It wasn’t given me
for twirling my thumbs or hiding in the cable tier when the enemy was
about. There were on board our ships some patriots that weren’t above
doing that sort of thing, I can tell you. But republic or no republic,
that kind wasn’t likely to get a gunner’s warrant.”

“That’s all right,” said Réal, with his eyes fixed on the English ship,
the head of which was swung to the northward now.... “Look, she seems to
have lost her way at last,” he remarked parenthetically to Peyrol, who
also glanced that way and nodded.... “That’s all right. But it’s on
record that you managed in a very short time to get very thick with a
lot of patriots ashore. Section leaders. Terrorists....”

“Why, yes. I wanted to hear what they had to say. They talked like a
drunken crew of scallywags that had stolen a ship. But at any rate it
wasn’t such as they that had sold the Port to the English. They were a
lot of bloodthirsty landlubbers. I did get out of town as soon as I
could. I remembered I was born around here. I knew no other bit of
France, and I didn’t care to go any further. Nobody came to look for
me.”

“No, not here. I suppose they thought it was too near. They did look for
you, a little, but they gave it up. Perhaps if they had persevered and
made an Admiral of you we would not have been beaten at Aboukir.”

At the mention of that name Peyrol shook his fist at the serene
Mediterranean sky. “And yet we were no worse men than the English,” he
cried, “and there are no such ships as ours in the world. You see,
lieutenant, the republican god of these talkers would never give us
seamen a chance of fair play.”

The lieutenant looked round in surprise. “What do you know about a
republican god?” he asked. “What on earth do you mean?”

“I have heard of and seen more gods than you could ever dream of in a
long night’s sleep, in every corner of the earth, in the very heart of
forests, which is an inconceivable thing. Figures, stones, sticks. There
must be something in the idea.... And what I meant,” he continued in a
resentful tone, “is that their republican god, which is neither stick
nor stone, but seems to be some kind of lubber, has never given us
seamen a chief like that one the soldiers have got ashore.”

Lieutenant Réal looked at Peyrol with unsmiling attention, then remarked
quietly, “Well, the god of the aristocrats is coming back again, and it
looks as if he were bringing an emperor along with him. You’ve heard
something of that, you people in the farmhouse? Haven’t you?”

“No,” said Peyrol. “I have heard no talk of an Emperor. But what does
it matter? Under one name or another a chief can be no more than a
chief, and that general whom they have been calling Consul is a good
chief--nobody can deny that.”

After saying those words in a dogmatic tone, Peyrol looked up at the sun
and suggested that it was time to go down to the farmhouse “pour manger
la soupe.” With a suddenly gloomy face Réal moved off, followed by
Peyrol. At the first turn of the path they got the view of the
Escampobar buildings with the pigeons still walking on the ridges of the
roofs, of the sunny orchards and yards without a living soul in them.
Peyrol remarked that everybody, no doubt, was in the kitchen waiting for
his and the lieutenant’s return. He himself was properly hungry. “And
you, lieutenant?”

The lieutenant was not hungry. Hearing this declaration made in a
peevish tone, Peyrol gave a sagacious movement of his head behind the
lieutenant’s back. Well, whatever happened, a man had to eat. He,
Peyrol, knew what it was to be altogether without food; but even
half-rations was a poor show, very poor show for anybody who had to work
or to fight. For himself he couldn’t imagine any conjuncture that would
prevent him having a meal as long as there was something to eat within
reach.

His unwonted garrulity provoked no response, but Peyrol continued to
talk in that strain as though his thoughts were concentrated on food,
while his eyes roved here and there and his ears were open for the
slightest sound. When they arrived in front of the house Peyrol stopped
to glance anxiously down the path to the coast, letting the lieutenant
enter the café. The Mediterranean, in that part which could be seen
from the door of the café, was as empty of all sail as a yet
undiscovered sea. The dull tinkle of a cracked bell on the neck of some
wandering cow was the only sound that reached him, accentuating the
Sunday peace of the farm. Two goats were lying down on the western slope
of the hill. It all had a very reassuring effect and the anxious
expression on Peyrol’s face was passing away when suddenly one of the
goats leaped to its feet. The rover gave a start and became rigid in a
pose of tense apprehension. A man who is in such a frame of mind that a
leaping goat makes him start cannot be happy. However, the other goat
remained lying down. There was really no reason for alarm, and Peyrol,
composing his features as near as possible to their usual placid
expression, followed the lieutenant into the house.




VII


A single cover having been laid at the end of a long table in the salle
for the lieutenant, he had his meal there while the others sat down to
theirs in the kitchen, the usual strangely assorted company served by
the anxious and silent Catherine. Peyrol, thoughtful and hungry, faced
Citizen Scevola in his working clothes and very much withdrawn within
himself. Scevola’s aspect was more feverish than usual, with the red
patches on his cheek-bones very marked above the thick beard. From time
to time the mistress of the farm would get up from her place by the side
of old Peyrol and go out into the salle to attend to the lieutenant. The
other three people seemed unconscious of her absences. Towards the end
of the meal Peyrol leaned back in his wooden chair and let his gaze rest
on the ex-terrorist who had not finished yet, and was still busy over
his plate with the air of a man who had done a long morning’s work. The
door leading from the kitchen to the salle stood wide open, but no sound
of voices ever came from there.

Till lately Peyrol had not concerned himself very much with the mental
states of the people with whom he lived. Now, however, he wondered to
himself what could be the thoughts of the ex-terrorist patriot, that
sanguinary and extremely poor creature occupying the position of master
of the Escampobar Farm. But when Citizen Scevola raised his head at
last to take a long drink of wine there was nothing new on that face
which in its high colour resembled so much a painted mask. Their eyes
met.

“Sacrebleu!” exclaimed Peyrol at last. “If you never say anything to
anybody like this you will forget how to speak at last.”

The patriot smiled from the depths of his beard, a smile which Peyrol
for some reason, mere prejudice perhaps, always thought resembled the
defensive grin of some small wild animal afraid of being cornered.

“What is there to talk about?” he retorted. “You live with us; you
haven’t budged from here; I suppose you have counted the bunches of
grapes in the enclosure and the figs on the fig-tree on the west wall
many times over....” He paused to lend an ear to the dead silence in the
salle, and then said with a slight rise of tone, “You and I know
everything that is going on here.”

Peyrol wrinkled the corners of his eyes in a keen, searching glance.
Catherine clearing the table bore herself as if she had been completely
deaf. Her face, of a walnut colour, with sunken cheeks and lips, might
have been a carving in the marvellous immobility of its fine wrinkles.
Her carriage was upright and her hands swift in their movements. Peyrol
said: “We don’t want to talk about the farm. Haven’t you heard any news
lately?”

The patriot shook his head violently. Of public news he had a horror.
Everything was lost. The country was ruled by perjurers and renegades.
All the patriotic virtues were dead. He struck the table with his fist
and then remained listening as though the blow could have roused an
echo in the silent house. Not the faintest sound came from anywhere.
Citizen Scevola sighed. It seemed to him that he was the only patriot
left, and even in his retirement his life was not safe.

“I know,” said Peyrol. “I saw the whole affair out of the window. You
can run like a hare, citizen.”

“Was I to allow myself to be sacrificed by those superstitious brutes?”
argued Citizen Scevola in a high-pitched voice and with genuine
indignation, which Peyrol watched coldly. He could hardly catch the
mutter of “Perhaps it would have been just as well if I had let those
reactionary dogs kill me that time.”

The old woman washing up at the sink glanced uneasily towards the door
of the salle.

“No!” shouted the lonely sans-culotte. “It isn’t possible! There must be
plenty of patriots left in France. The sacred fire is not burnt out
yet.”

For a short time he presented the appearance of a man who is sitting
with ashes on his head and desolation in his heart. His almond-shaped
eyes looked dull, extinguished. But after a moment he gave a sidelong
look at Peyrol as if to watch the effect and began declaiming in a low
voice and apparently as if rehearsing a speech to himself: “No, it isn’t
possible. Some day tyranny will stumble and then it will be time to pull
it down again. We will come out in our thousands and--ça ira!”

Those words, and even the passionate energy of the tone, left Peyrol
unmoved. With his head sustained by his thick brown hand he was thinking
of something else so obviously as to depress again the feebly struggling
spirit of terrorism in the lonely breast of Citizen Scevola. The glow
of reflected sunlight in the kitchen became darkened by the body of the
fisherman of the lagoon, mumbling a shy greeting to the company from the
frame of the doorway. Without altering his position Peyrol turned his
eyes on him curiously. Catherine, wiping her hands on her apron,
remarked: “You come late for your dinner, Michel.” He stepped in then,
took from the old woman’s hand an earthenware pot and a large hunk of
bread and carried it out at once into the yard. Peyrol and the
sans-culotte got up from the table. The latter, after hesitating like
somebody who has lost his way, went brusquely into the passage, while
Peyrol, avoiding Catherine’s anxious stare, made for the backyard.
Through the open door of the salle he obtained a glimpse of Arlette
sitting upright with her hands in her lap gazing at somebody he could
not see, but who could be no other than Lieutenant Réal.

In the blaze and heat of the yard the chickens, broken up into small
groups, were having their siesta in patches of shade. But Peyrol cared
nothing for the sun. Michel, who was eating his dinner under the pent
roof of the cart shed, put the earthenware pot down on the ground and
joined his master at the well encircled by a low wall of stones and
topped by an arch of wrought iron on which a wild fig-tree had twined a
slender offshoot. After his dog’s death the fisherman had abandoned the
salt lagoon, leaving his rotting punt exposed on the dismal shore and
his miserable nets shut up in the dark hut. He did not care for another
dog, and besides, who was there to give him a dog? He was the last of
men. Somebody must be last. There was no place for him in the life of
the village. So one fine morning he had walked up to the farm in order
to see Peyrol. More correctly perhaps, to let himself be seen by Peyrol.
That was exactly Michel’s only hope. He sat down on a stone outside the
gate with a small bundle, consisting mainly of an old blanket, and a
crooked stick lying on the ground near him, and looking the most lonely,
mild and harmless creature on this earth. Peyrol had listened gravely to
his confused tale of the dog’s death. He, personally, would not have
made a friend of a dog like Michel’s dog, but he understood perfectly
the sudden breaking up of the establishment on the shore of the lagoon.
So when Michel had concluded with the words, “I thought I would come up
here,” Peyrol, without waiting for a plain request, had said: “Très
bien. You will be my crew,” and had pointed down the path leading to the
sea-shore. And as Michel, picking up his bundle and stick, started off,
waiting for no further directions, he had shouted after him: “You will
find a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine in a locker aft, to break your
fast on.”

These had been the only formalities of Michel’s engagement to serve as
“crew” on board Peyrol’s boat. The rover, indeed, had tried without loss
of time to carry out his purpose of getting something of his own that
would float. It was not so easy to find anything worthy. The miserable
population of Madrague, a tiny fishing hamlet facing towards Toulon, had
nothing to sell. Moreover, Peyrol looked with contempt on all their
possessions. He would have as soon bought a catamaran of three logs of
wood tied together with rattans as one of their boats; but lonely and
prominent on the beach, lying on her side in weather-beaten melancholy,
there was a two-masted tartane with her sun-whitened cordage hanging in
festoons and her dry masts showing long cracks. No man was ever seen
dozing under the shade of her hull, on which the Mediterranean gulls
made themselves very much at home. She looked a wreck thrown high up on
the land by a disdainful sea. Peyrol, having surveyed her from a
distance, saw that the rudder still hung in its place. He ran his eye
along her body and said to himself that a craft with such lines would
sail well. She was much bigger than anything he had thought of, but in
her size, too, there was a fascination. It seemed to bring all the
shores of the Mediterranean within his reach, Baleares and Corsica,
Barbary and Spain. Peyrol had sailed over hundreds of leagues of ocean
in craft that were no bigger. At his back, in silent wonder, a knot of
fishermen’s wives, bareheaded and lean, with a swarm of ragged children
clinging to their skirts, watched the first stranger they had seen for
years.

Peyrol borrowed a short ladder in the hamlet (he knew better than to
trust his weight to any of the ropes hanging over the side) and carried
it down to the beach, followed at a respectful distance by the staring
women and children: a phenomenon and a wonder to the natives, as it had
happened to him before on more than one island in distant seas. He
clambered on board the neglected tartane and stood on the decked
fore-part, the centre of all eyes. A gull flew away with an angry
scream. The bottom of the open hold contained nothing but a little sand,
a few broken pieces of wood, a rusty hook, and some few stalks of straw
which the wind must have carried for miles before they found their rest
in there. The decked after-part had a small skylight and a companion,
and Peyrol’s eyes rested fascinated on an enormous padlock which secured
its sliding door. It was as if there had been secrets or treasures
inside--and yet most probably it was empty. Peyrol turned his head away
and with the whole strength of his lungs shouted in the direction of the
fishermen’s wives, who had been joined by two very old men and a
hunchbacked cripple swinging between two crutches.

“Is there anybody looking after this tartane, a caretaker?”

At first the only answer was a movement of recoil. Only the hunchback
held his ground and shouted back in an unexpectedly strong voice.

“You are the first man that has been on board her for years.”

The wives of the fishermen admired his boldness, for Peyrol indeed
appeared to them a very formidable being.

“I might have guessed that,” thought Peyrol. “She is in a dreadful
mess.” The disturbed gull had brought some friends as indignant as
itself and they circled at different levels uttering wild cries over
Peyrol’s head. He shouted again:

“Who does she belong to?”

The being on crutches lifted a finger towards the circling birds and
answered in a deep tone:

“They are the only ones I know.” Then, as Peyrol gazed down at him over
the side, he went on: “This craft used to belong to Escampobar. You know
Escampobar? It’s a house in the hollow between the hills there.”

“Yes, I know Escampobar,” yelled Peyrol, turning away and leaning
against the mast in a pose which he did not change for a long time. His
immobility tired out the crowd. They moved slowly in a body towards
their hovels, the hunchback bringing up the rear with long swings
between his crutches, and Peyrol remained alone with the angry gulls. He
lingered on board the tragic craft which had taken Arlette’s parents to
their death in the vengeful massacre of Toulon and had brought the
youthful Arlette and Citizen Scevola back to Escampobar, where old
Catherine, left alone at that time, had waited for days for somebody’s
return. Days of anguish and prayer, while she listened to the booming of
guns about Toulon and with an almost greater but different terror to the
dead silence which ensued.

Peyrol, enjoying the sensation of some sort of craft under his feet,
indulged in no images of horror connected with that desolate tartane. It
was late in the evening before he returned to the farm, so that he had
to have his supper alone. The women had retired, only the sans-culotte,
smoking a short pipe out of doors, had followed him into the kitchen and
asked where he had been and whether he had lost his way. This question
gave Peyrol an opening. He had been to Madrague and had seen a very fine
tartane lying perishing on the beach.

“They told me down there that she belonged to you, citoyen.”

At this the terrorist only blinked.

“What’s the matter? Isn’t she the craft you came here in? Won’t you sell
her to me?” Peyrol waited a little. “What objection can you have?”

It appeared that the patriot had no positive objections. He mumbled
something about the tartane being very dirty. This caused Peyrol to look
at him with intense astonishment.

“I am ready to take her off your hands as she stands.”

“I will be frank with you, citoyen. You see, when she lay at the quay in
Toulon a lot of fugitive traitors, men and women, and children too,
swarmed on board of her, and cut the ropes with a view of escaping, but
the avengers were not far behind and made short work of them. When we
discovered her behind the Arsenal I and another man, we had to throw a
lot of bodies overboard, out of the hold and the cabin. You will find
her very dirty all over. We had no time to clear up.” Peyrol felt
inclined to laugh. He had seen decks swimming in blood and had himself
helped to throw dead bodies overboard after a fight; but he eyed the
citizen with an unfriendly eye. He thought to himself: “He had a hand in
that massacre, no doubt,” but he made no audible remark. He only thought
of the enormous padlock securing that emptied charnel-house at the
stern. The terrorist insisted. “We really had not a moment to clean her
up. The circumstances were such that it was necessary for me to get away
quickly lest some of the false patriots should do me some carmagnole or
other. There had been bitter quarrelling in my section. I was not alone
in getting away, you know.”

Peyrol waved his arm to cut short the explanation. But before he and the
terrorist had parted for the night Peyrol could regard himself as the
owner of the tragic tartane.

Next day he returned to the hamlet and took up his quarters there for a
time. The awe he had inspired wore off, though no one cared to come
very near the tartane. Peyrol did not want any help. He wrenched off the
enormous padlock himself with a bar of iron and let the light of day
into the little cabin which did indeed bear the traces of the massacre
in the stains of blood on its woodwork, but contained nothing else
except a wisp of long hair and a woman’s ear-ring, a cheap thing which
Peyrol picked up and looked at for a long time. The associations of such
finds were not foreign to his past. He could without very strong emotion
figure to himself the little place choked with corpses. He sat down and
looked about at the stains and splashes which had been untouched by
sunlight for years. The cheap little ear-ring lay before him on the
rough-hewn table between the lockers, and he shook his head at it
weightily. He, at any rate, had never been a butcher.

Peyrol, unassisted, did all the cleaning. Then he turned con amore to
the fitting out of the tartane. The habits of activity still clung to
him. He welcomed something to do; this congenial task had all the air of
preparation for a voyage, which was a pleasing dream, and it brought
every evening the satisfaction of something achieved to that illusory
end. He rove new gear, scraped the masts himself, did all the sweeping,
scrubbing and painting single-handed, working steadily and hopefully as
though he had been preparing his escape from a desert island; and
directly he had cleaned and renovated the dark little hole of a cabin he
took to sleeping on board. Once only he went up on a visit to the farm
for a couple of days, as if to give himself a holiday. He passed them
mostly in observing Arlette. She was perhaps the first problematic
human being he had ever been in contact with. Peyrol had no contempt
for women. He had seen them love, suffer, endure, riot, and even fight
for their own hand, very much like men. Generally with men and women you
had to be on your guard, but in some ways women were more to be trusted.
As a matter of fact, his country-women were to him less known than any
other kind. From his experience of many different races, however, he had
a vague idea that women were very much alike everywhere. This one was a
lovable creature. She produced on him the effect of a child, aroused a
kind of intimate emotion which he had not known before to exist by
itself in a man. He was startled by its detached character. “Is it that
I am getting old?” he asked himself suddenly one evening, as he sat on
the bench against the wall looking straight before him, after she had
crossed his line of sight.

He felt himself an object of observation to Catherine, whom he used to
detect peeping at him round the corners or through half-opened doors. On
his part he would stare at her openly, aware of the impression he
produced on her: mingled curiosity and awe. He had the idea she did not
disapprove of his presence at the farm, where, it was plain to him, she
had a far from easy life. This had no relation to the fact that she did
all the household work. She was a woman of about his own age, straight
as a dart but with a wrinkled face. One evening as they were sitting
alone in the kitchen Peyrol said to her: “You must have been a handsome
girl in your day, Catherine. It’s strange you never got married.”

She turned to him under the high mantel of the fireplace and seemed
struck all of a heap, unbelieving, amazed, so that Peyrol was quite
provoked. “What’s the matter? If the old moke in the yard had spoken you
could not look more surprised. You can’t deny that you were a handsome
girl.”

She recovered from her scare to say: “I was born here, grew up here, and
early in my life I made up my mind to die here.”

“A strange notion,” said Peyrol, “for a young girl to take into her
head.”

“It’s not a thing to talk about,” said the old woman, stooping to get a
pot out of the warm ashes. “I did not think, then,” she went on, with
her back to Peyrol, “that I would live long. When I was eighteen I fell
in love with a priest.”

“Ah, bah!” exclaimed Peyrol under his breath.

“That was the time when I prayed for death,” she pursued in a quiet
voice. “I spent nights on my knees upstairs in that room where you sleep
now. I shunned everybody. People began to say I was crazy. We have
always been hated by the rabble about here. They have poisonous tongues.
I got the nickname of ‘la fiancée du prêtre.’ Yes, I was handsome, but
who would have looked at me if I had wanted to be looked at? My only
luck was to have a fine man for a brother. He understood. No word passed
his lips, but sometimes when we were alone, and not even his wife was
by, he would lay his hand on my shoulder gently. From that time to this
I have not been to church, and I never will go. But I have no quarrel
with God now.”

There were no signs of watchfulness and care in her bearing now. She
stood straight as an arrow before Peyrol and looked at him with a
confident air. The rover was not yet ready to speak. He only nodded
twice, and Catherine turned away to put the pot to cool in the sink.
“Yes, I wished to die. But I did not, and now I have got something to
do,” she said, sitting down near the fireplace and taking her chin in
her hand. “And I dare say you know what that is,” she added.

Peyrol got up deliberately.

“Well! bonsoir,” he said. “I am off to Madrague. I want to begin work
again on the tartane at daylight.”

“Don’t talk to me about the tartane! She took my brother away for ever.
I stood on the shore watching her sails growing smaller and smaller.
Then I came up alone to this farmhouse.”

Moving calmly her faded lips which no lover or child had ever kissed,
old Catherine told Peyrol of the days and nights of waiting, with the
distant growl of the big guns in her ears. She used to sit outside on
the bench longing for news, watching the flickers in the sky and
listening to heavy bursts of gunfire coming over the water. Then came a
night as if the world were coming to an end. All the sky was lighted up,
the earth shook to its foundations, and she felt the house rock, so that
jumping up from the bench she screamed with fear. That night she never
went to bed. Next morning she saw the sea covered with sails, while a
black and yellow cloud of smoke hung over Toulon. A man coming up from
Madrague told her that he believed that the whole town had been blown
up. She gave him a bottle of wine and he helped her to feed the stock
that evening. Before going home he expressed the opinion that there
could not be a soul left alive in Toulon, because the few that survived
would have gone away in the English ships. Nearly a week later she was
dozing by the fire when voices outside woke her up, and she beheld
standing in the middle of the salle, pale like a corpse out of a grave,
with a blood-soaked blanket over her shoulders and a red cap on her
head, a ghastly-looking young girl in whom she suddenly recognized her
niece. She screamed in her terror: “François, François!” This was her
brother’s name, and she thought he was outside. Her scream scared the
girl, who ran out of the door. All was still outside. Once more she
screamed “François!” and, tottering as far as the door, she saw her
niece clinging to a strange man in a red cap and with a sabre by his
side, who yelled excitedly: “You won’t see François again. Vive la
République!”

“I recognized the son Bron,” went on Catherine. “I knew his parents.
When the troubles began he left his home to follow the Revolution. I
walked straight up to him and took the girl away from his side. She
didn’t want much coaxing. The child always loved me,” she continued,
getting up from the stool and moving a little closer to Peyrol. “She
remembered her Aunt Catherine. I tore the horrid blanket off her
shoulders. Her hair was clotted with blood and her clothes all stained
with it. I took her upstairs. She was as helpless as a little child. I
undressed her and examined her all over. She had no hurt anywhere. I was
sure of that--but of what more could I be sure? I couldn’t make sense of
the things she babbled at me. Her very voice distracted me. She fell
asleep directly I had put her into my bed, and I stood there looking
down at her, nearly going out of my mind with the thought of what that
child may have been dragged through. When I went downstairs I found that
good-for-nothing inside the house. He was ranting up and down the salle,
vapouring and boasting till I thought all this must be an awful dream.
My head was in a whirl. He laid claim to her, and God knows what. I
seemed to understand things that made my hair stir on my head. I stood
there clasping my hands with all the strength I had, for fear I should
go out of my senses.”

“He frightened you,” said Peyrol, looking at her steadily. Catherine
moved a step nearer to him.

“What? The son Bron, frighten me! He was the butt of all the girls,
mooning about amongst the people outside the church on feast days in the
time of the King. All the countryside knew about him. No. What I said to
myself was that I musn’t let him kill me. There upstairs was the child I
had just got away from him, and there was I, all alone with that man
with the sabre and unable to get hold of a kitchen knife even.”

“And so he remained,” said Peyrol.

“What would you have had me to do?” asked Catherine steadily. “He had
brought the child back out of those shambles. It was a long time before
I got an idea of what had happened. I don’t know everything even yet,
and I suppose I will never know. In a very few days my mind was more at
ease about Arlette, but it was a long time before she would speak and
then it was never anything to the purpose. And what could I have done
single-handed? There was nobody I would condescend to call to my help.
We of the Escampobar have never been in favour with the peasants here,”
she said proudly. “And that is all I can tell you.”

Her voice faltered, she sat down on the stool again and took her chin in
the palm of her hand. As Peyrol left the house to go to the hamlet he
saw Arlette and the patron come round the corner of the yard wall
walking side by side but as if unconscious of each other.

That night he slept on board the renovated tartane and the rising sun
found him at work about the hull. By that time he had ceased to be the
object of awed contemplation to the inhabitants of the hamlet, who
still, however, kept up a mistrustful attitude. His only intermediary
for communicating with them was the miserable cripple. He was Peyrol’s
only company, in fact, during his period of work on the tartane. He had
more activity, audacity, and intelligence, it seemed to Peyrol, than all
the rest of the inhabitants put together. Early in the morning he could
be seen making his way on his crutches with a pendulum motion towards
the hull on which Peyrol would have been already an hour or so at work.
Peyrol then would throw him over a sound rope’s end and the cripple,
leaning his crutches against the side of the tartane, would pull his
wretched little carcass, all withered below the waist, up the rope, hand
over hand, with extreme ease. There, sitting on the small foredeck with
his back against the mast and his thin, twisted legs folded in front of
him, he would keep Peyrol company, talking to him along the whole length
of the tartane in a strained voice and sharing his midday meal, as of
right, since it was he generally who brought the provisions slung round
his neck in a quaint flat basket. Thus were the hours of labour
shortened for Peyrol by shrewd remarks and bits of local gossip. How the
cripple got hold of it it was difficult to imagine, and the rover had
not enough knowledge of European superstitions to suspect him of flying
through the night on a broomstick like a sort of male witch--for there
was a manliness in that twisted scrap of humanity which struck Peyrol
from the first. His very voice was manly and the character of his gossip
was not feminine. He did indeed mention to Peyrol that people used to
take him about the neighbourhood in carts for the purpose of playing a
fiddle at weddings and other festive occasions; but this seemed hardly
adequate, and even he himself confessed that there was not much of that
sort of thing going on during the Revolution, when people didn’t like to
attract attention and everything was done in a hole-and-corner manner.
There were no priests to officiate at weddings, and if there were no
ceremonies how could there be rejoicings. Of course children were born
as before, but there were no christenings--and people got to look funny
somehow or other. Their countenances got changed somehow; the very boys
and girls seemed to have something on their minds.

Peyrol, busy about one thing and another, listened without appearing to
pay much attention to the story of the Revolution, as if to the tale of
an intelligent islander on the other side of the world talking of bloody
rites and amazing hopes of some religion unknown to the rest of mankind.
But there was something biting in the speech of that cripple which
confused his thoughts a little. Sarcasm was a mystery which he could
not understand. On one occasion he remarked to his friend the cripple
as they sat together on the foredeck munching the bread and figs of
their midday meal:

“There must have been something in it. But it doesn’t seem to have done
much for you people here.”

“To be sure,” retorted the scrap of man vivaciously, “it hasn’t
straightened my back or given me a pair of legs like yours.”

Peyrol, whose trousers were rolled up above the knee because he had been
washing the hold, looked at his calves complacently. “You could hardly
have expected that,” he remarked with simplicity.

“Ah, but you don’t know what people with properly made bodies expected
or pretended to,” said the cripple. “Everything was going to be changed.
Everybody was going to tie up his dog with a string of sausages for the
sake of principles.” His long face, which, in repose, had an expression
of suffering peculiar to cripples, was lighted up by an enormous grin.
“They must feel jolly well sold by this time,” he added. “And of course
that vexes them, but I am not vexed. I was never vexed with my father
and mother. While the poor things were alive I never went hungry--not
very hungry. They couldn’t have been very proud of me.” He paused and
seemed to contemplate himself mentally. “I don’t know what I would have
done in their place. Something very different. But then, don’t you see,
I know what it means to be like I am. Of course they couldn’t know, and
I don’t suppose the poor people had very much sense. A priest from
Almanarre--Almanarre is a sort of village up there where there is a
church....”

Peyrol interrupted him by remarking that he knew all about Almanarre.
This, on his part, was a simple delusion because in reality he knew much
less of Almanarre than of Zanzibar or any pirate village from there up
to Cape Guardafui. And the cripple contemplated him with his brown eyes,
which had an upward cast naturally.

“You know ...! For me,” he went on, in a tone of quiet decision, “you
are a man fallen from the sky. Well, a priest from Almanarre came to
bury them. A fine man with a stern face. The finest man I have seen from
that time till you dropped on us here. There was a story of a girl
having fallen in love with him some years before. I was old enough then
to have heard something of it, but that’s neither here nor there.
Moreover, many people wouldn’t believe the tale.”

Peyrol, without looking at the cripple, tried to imagine what sort of
child he might have been--what sort of youth? The rover had seen
staggering deformities, dreadful mutilations which were the cruel work
of man: but it was amongst people with dusky skins. And that made a
great difference. But what he had heard and seen since he had come back
to his native land, the tales, the facts, and also the faces, reached
his sensibility with a particular force, because of that feeling that
came to him so suddenly after a whole lifetime spent amongst Indians,
Malagashes, Arabs, blackamoors of all sorts, that he belonged there, to
this land, and had escaped all those things by a mere hair’s breadth.
His companion completed his significant silence, which seemed to have
been occupied with thoughts very much like his own, by saying:

“All this was in the King’s time. They didn’t cut off his head till
several years afterwards. It didn’t make my life any easier for me, but
since those Republicans had deposed God and flung Him out of all the
churches I have forgiven Him all my troubles.”

“Spoken like a man,” said Peyrol. Only the misshapen character of the
cripple’s back prevented Peyrol from giving him a hearty slap. He got up
to begin his afternoon’s work. It was a bit of inside painting, and from
the foredeck the cripple watched him at it with dreamy eyes and
something ironic on his lips.

It was not till the sun had travelled over Cape Cicié, which could be
seen across the water like dark mist in the glare, that he opened his
lips to ask: “And what do you propose to do with this tartane, citoyen?”

Peyrol answered simply that the tartane was fit to go anywhere now, the
very moment she took the water.

“You could go as far as Genoa and Naples and even further,” suggested
the cripple.

“Much further,” said Peyrol.

“And you have been fitting her out like this for a voyage?”

“Certainly,” said Peyrol, using his brush steadily.

“Somehow I fancy it will not be a long one.”

Peyrol never checked the to-and-fro movement of his brush, but it was
with an effort. The fact was that he had discovered in himself a
distinct reluctance to go away from the Escampobar Farm. His desire to
have something of his own that could float was no longer associated with
any desire to wander. The cripple was right. The voyage of the renovated
tartane would not take her very far. What was surprising was the fellow
being so very positive about it. He seemed able to read people’s
thoughts.

The dragging of the renovated tartane into the water was a great affair.
Everybody in the hamlet, including the women, did a full day’s work and
there was never so much coin passed from hand to hand in the hamlet in
all the days of its obscure history. Swinging between his crutches on a
low sand-ridge the cripple surveyed the whole of the beach. It was he
that had persuaded the villagers to lend a hand and had arranged the
terms for their assistance. It was he also who, through a very
miserable-looking pedlar (the only one who frequented the peninsula),
had got in touch with some rich persons in Fréjus who had changed for
Peyrol a few of his gold pieces for current money. He had expedited the
course of the most exciting and interesting experience of his life, and
now planted on the sand on his two sticks in the manner of a beacon he
watched the last operation. The rover, as if about to launch himself
upon a track of a thousand miles, walked up to shake hands with him and
look once more at the soft eyes and the ironic smile.

“There is no denying it--you are a man.”

“Don’t talk like this to me, citoyen,” said the cripple in a trembling
voice. Till then, suspended between his two sticks and with his
shoulders as high as his ears, he had not looked towards the approaching
Peyrol. “This is too much of a compliment!”

“I tell you,” insisted the rover roughly, and as if the insignificance
of mortal envelopes had presented itself to him for the first time at
the end of his roving life, “I tell you that there is that in you which
would make a chum one would like to have alongside one in a tight
place.”

As he went away from the cripple towards the tartane, while the whole
population of the hamlet disposed around her waited for his word, some
on land and some waist-deep in the water holding ropes in their hands,
Peyrol had a slight shudder at the thought: “Suppose I had been born
like that.” Ever since he had put his foot on his native land such
thoughts had haunted him. They would have been impossible anywhere else.
He could not have been like any blackamoor, good, bad or indifferent,
hale or crippled, king or slave; but here, on this Southern shore that
had called to him irresistibly as he had approached the Straits of
Gibraltar on what he had felt to be his last voyage, any woman, lean and
old enough, might have been his mother; he might have been any Frenchman
of them all, even one of those he pitied, even one of those he despised.
He felt the grip of his origins from the crown of his head to the soles
of his feet while he clambered on board the tartane as if for a long and
distant voyage. As a matter of fact he knew very well that with a bit of
luck it would be over in about an hour. When the tartane took the water
the feeling of being afloat plucked at his very heart. Some Madrague
fishermen had been persuaded by the cripple to help old Peyrol to sail
the tartane round to the cove below the Escampobar Farm. A glorious sun
shone upon that short passage and the cove itself was full of sparkling
light when they arrived. The few Escampobar goats wandering on the
hillside pretending to feed where no grass was visible to the naked eye
never even raised their heads. A gentle breeze drove the tartane, as
fresh as paint could make her, opposite a narrow crack in the cliff
which gave admittance to a tiny basin, no bigger than a village pond,
concealed at the foot of the southern hill. It was there that old
Peyrol, aided by the Madrague men, who had their boat with them, towed
his ship, the first really that he ever owned.

Once in, the tartane nearly filled the little basin, and the fishermen,
getting into their boat, rowed away for home. Peyrol, by spending the
afternoon in dragging ropes ashore and fastening them to various
boulders and dwarf trees, moored her to his complete satisfaction. She
was as safe from the tempests there as a house ashore.

After he had made everything fast on board and had furled the sails
neatly, a matter of some time for one man, Peyrol contemplated his
arrangements, which savoured of rest much more than of wandering, and
found them good. Though he never meant to abandon his room at the
farmhouse, he felt that his true home was in the tartane, and he
rejoiced at the idea that it was concealed from all eyes except perhaps
the eyes of the goats when their arduous feeding took them on the
southern slope. He lingered on board, he even threw open the sliding
door of the little cabin, which now smelt of fresh paint, not of stale
blood. Before he started for the farm the sun had travelled far beyond
Spain and all the sky to the west was yellow, while on the side of Italy
it presented a sombre canopy pierced here and there with the light of
stars. Catherine put a plate on the table, but nobody asked him any
questions.

He spent a lot of his time on board, going down early, coming up at
midday “pour manger la soupe,” and sleeping on board almost every night.
He did not like to leave the tartane alone for so many hours. Often,
having climbed a little way up to the house, he would turn round for a
last look at her in the gathering dusk, and actually would go back
again. After Michel had been enlisted for a crew and had taken his abode
on board for good, Peyrol found it a much easier matter to spend his
nights in the lantern-like room at the top of the farmhouse.

Often waking up at night he would get up to look at the starry sky out
of all his three windows in succession, and think: “Now there is nothing
in the world to prevent me getting out to sea in less than an hour.” As
a matter of fact it was possible for two men to manage the tartane. Thus
Peyrol’s thought was comfortingly true in every way, for he loved to
feel himself free, and Michel of the lagoon, after the death of his
depressed dog, had no tie on earth. It was a fine thought which somehow
made it quite easy for Peyrol to go back to his four-poster and resume
his slumbers.




VIII


Perched sideways on the circular wall bordering the well, in the full
blaze of the midday sun, the rover of the distant seas and the fisherman
of the lagoon, sharing between them a most surprising secret, had the
air of two men conferring in the dark. The first word that Peyrol said
was, “Well?”

“All quiet,” said the other.

“Have you fastened the cabin door properly?”

“You know what the fastenings are like.”

Peyrol could not deny that. It was a sufficient answer. It shifted the
responsibility on to his shoulders, and all his life he had been
accustomed to trust to the work of his own hands, in peace and in war.
Yet he looked doubtfully at Michel before he remarked:

“Yes, but I know the man too.”

There could be no greater contrast than those two faces; Peyrol’s clean,
like a carving of stone, and only very little softened by time, and that
of the owner of the late dog, hirsute, with many silver threads, with
something elusive in the features and the vagueness of expression of a
baby in arms. “Yes, I know the man,” repeated Peyrol. Michel’s mouth
fell open at this, a small oval set a little crookedly in the innocent
face.

“He will never wake,” he suggested timidly.

The possession of a common and momentous secret draws men together.
Peyrol condescended to explain.

“You don’t know the thickness of his skull. I do.”

He spoke as though he had made it himself. Michel, who in the face of
that positive statement had forgotten to shut his mouth, had nothing to
say.

“He breathes all right?” asked Peyrol.

“Yes. After I got out and locked the door I listened for a bit and I
thought I heard him snore.”

Peyrol looked interested and also slightly anxious.

“I had to come up and show myself this morning as if nothing had
happened,” he said. “The officer has been here for two days, and he
might have taken it into his head to go down to the tartane. I have been
on the stretch all the morning. A goat jumping up was enough to give me
a turn. Fancy him running up here with his broken head all bandaged up,
with you after him.”

This seemed to be too much for Michel. He said almost indignantly:

“The man’s half killed.”

“It takes a lot to even half kill a Brother of the Coast. There are men
and men. You, for instance,” Peyrol continued placidly, “you would have
been altogether killed if it had been your head that got in the way. And
there are animals, beasts twice your size, regular monsters, that may be
killed with nothing more than just a tap on the nose. That’s well known.
I was really afraid he would overcome you in some way or other....”

“Come, maître! One isn’t a little child,” protested Michel against this
accumulation of improbabilities. He did it, however, only in a whisper
and with childlike shyness. Peyrol folded his arms on his breast:

“Go, finish your soup,” he commanded in a low voice, “and then go down
to the tartane. You locked the cabin door properly, you said?”

“Yes, I have,” protested Michel, staggered by this display of anxiety.
“He could sooner burst the deck above his head, as you know.”

“All the same, take a small spar and shore up that door against the heel
of the mast. And then watch outside. Don’t you go in to him on any
account. Stay on deck and keep a lookout for me. There is a tangle here
that won’t be easily cleared and I must be very careful. I will try to
slip away and get down as soon as I get rid of that officer.”

The conference in the sunshine being ended, Peyrol walked leisurely out
of the yard gate, and protruding his head beyond the corner of the
house, saw Lieutenant Réal sitting on the bench. This he had expected to
see. But he had not expected to see him there alone. It was just like
this: wherever Arlette happened to be, there were worrying
possibilities. But she might have been helping her aunt in the kitchen
with her sleeves rolled up on such white arms as Peyrol had never seen
on any woman before. The way she had taken to dressing her hair in a
plait with a broad black velvet ribbon and an Arlesian cap was very
becoming. She was wearing now her mother’s clothes of which there were
chestfuls, altered for her of course. The late mistress of the
Escampobar Farm had been an Arlesienne. Well-to-do, too. Yes, even for
women’s clothes the Escampobar natives could do without intercourse with
the outer world. It was quite time that this confounded lieutenant went
back to Toulon. This was the third day. His short leave must be up.
Peyrol’s attitude towards naval officers had been always guarded and
suspicious. His relations with them had been very mixed. They had been
his enemies and his superiors. He had been chased by them. He had been
trusted by them. The Revolution had made a clean cut across the
consistency of his wild life--Brother of the Coast and gunner in the
national Navy--and yet he was always the same man. It was like that,
too, with them. Officers of the King, officers of the Republic, it was
only changing the skin. All alike looked askance at a free rover. Even
this one could not forget his epaulettes when talking to him. Scorn and
mistrust of epaulettes were rooted deeply in old Peyrol. Yet he did not
absolutely hate Lieutenant Réal. Only the fellow’s coming to the farm
was generally a curse and his presence at that particular moment a
confounded nuisance and to a certain extent even a danger. “I have no
mind to be hauled to Toulon by the scruff of my neck,” Peyrol said to
himself. There was no trusting those epaulette-wearers. Any one of them
was capable of jumping on his best friend on account of some
officer-like notion or other.

Peyrol, stepping round the corner, sat down by the side of Lieutenant
Réal with the feeling somehow of coming to grips with a slippery
customer. The lieutenant, as he sat there, unaware of Peyrol’s survey of
his person, gave no notion of slipperiness. On the contrary, he looked
rather immovably established. Very much at home. Too much at home. Even
after Peyrol sat down by his side he continued to look immovable--or at
least difficult to get rid of. In the still noonday heat the faint
shrilling of cicadas was the only sound of life heard for quite a long
time. Delicate, evanescent, cheerful, careless sort of life, yet not
without passion. A sudden gloom seemed to be cast over the joy of the
cicadas by the lieutenant’s voice though the words were the most
perfunctory possible.

“Tiens! Vous voilà.”

In the stress of the situation Peyrol at once asked himself: Now why
does he say that? Where did he expect me to be? The lieutenant need not
have spoken at all. He had known him now for about two years off and on,
and it had happened many times that they had sat side by side on that
bench in a sort of “at arm’s length” equality without exchanging a
single word. And why could he not have kept quiet now? That naval
officer never spoke without an object, but what could one make of words
like that? Peyrol achieved an insincere yawn and suggested mildly:

“A bit of siesta wouldn’t be amiss. What do you think, lieutenant?”

And to himself he thought: “No fear, he won’t go to his room.” He would
stay there and thereby keep him, Peyrol, from going down to the cove. He
turned his eyes on that naval officer and if extreme and concentrated
desire and mere force of will could have had any effect Lieutenant Réal
would certainly have been removed suddenly from that bench. But he
didn’t move. And Peyrol was astonished to see that man smile, but what
astonished him still more was to hear him say:

“The trouble is that you have never been frank with me, Peyrol.”

“Frank with you,” repeated the rover. “You want me to be frank with you?
Well, I have wished you to the devil many times.”

“That’s better,” said Lieutenant Réal. “But why? I never tried to do you
any harm.”

“Me harm,” cried Peyrol, “to me?”... But he faltered in his indignation
as if frightened at it and ended in a very quiet tone: “You have been
nosing in a lot of dirty papers to find something against a man who was
not doing _you_ any harm and was a seaman before you were born.”

“Quite a mistake. There was no nosing amongst papers. I came on them
quite by accident. I won’t deny I was intrigué finding a man of your
sort living in this place. But don’t be uneasy. Nobody would trouble his
head about you. It’s a long time since you have been forgotten. Have no
fear.”

“You! You talk to me of fear ...? No,” cried the rover, “it’s enough to
turn a fellow into a sans-culotte if it weren’t for the sight of that
specimen sneaking around here.”

The lieutenant turned his head sharply, and for a moment the naval
officer and the free sea rover looked at each other gloomily. When
Peyrol spoke again he had changed his mood.

“Why should I fear anybody? I owe nothing to anybody. I have given them
up the prize ship in order and everything else, except my luck; and for
that I account to nobody,” he added darkly.

“I don’t know what you are driving at,” the lieutenant said after a
moment of thought. “All I know is that you seem to have given up your
share of the prize money. There is no record of you ever claiming it.”

Peyrol did not like the sarcastic tone. “You have a nasty tongue,” he
said, “with your damned trick of talking as if you were made of
different clay.”

“No offence,” said the lieutenant, grave but a little puzzled. “Nobody
will drag out that against you. It has been paid years ago to the
Invalides’ fund. All this is buried and forgotten.”

Peyrol was grumbling and swearing to himself with such concentration
that the lieutenant stopped and waited till he had finished.

“And there is no record of desertion or anything like that,” he
continued then. “You stand there as _disparu_. I believe that after
searching for you a little they came to the conclusion that you had come
by your death somehow or other.”

“Did they? Well, perhaps old Peyrol is dead. At any rate he has buried
himself here.” The rover suffered from great instability of feelings,
for he passed in a flash from melancholy into fierceness. “And he was
quiet enough till you came sniffing around this hole. More than once in
my life I had occasion to wonder how soon the jackals would have a
chance to dig up my carcass; but to have a naval officer come scratching
round here was the last thing....” Again a change came over him. “What
can you want here?” he whispered, suddenly depressed.

The lieutenant fell into the humour of that discourse. “I don’t want to
disturb the dead,” he said, turning full to the rover, who, after his
last words, had fixed his eyes on the ground. “I want to talk to the
gunner Peyrol.”

Peyrol, without raising his eyes from the ground, growled: “He isn’t
there. He is _disparu_. Go and look at the papers again. Vanished.
Nobody here.”

“That,” said Lieutenant Réal in a conversational tone, “that is a lie.
He was talking to me this morning on the hill-side as we were looking at
the English ship. He knows all about her. He told me he spent nights
making plans for her capture. He seemed to be a fellow with his heart in
the right place. _Un homme de cœur._ You know him.”

Peyrol raised his big head slowly and looked at the lieutenant.

“Humph,” he grunted. A heavy, non-committal grunt. His old heart was
stirred, but the tangle was such that he had to be on his guard with any
man who wore epaulettes. His profile preserved the immobility of a head
struck on a medal while he listened to the lieutenant assuring him that
this time he had come to Escampobar on purpose to speak with the gunner
Peyrol. That he had not done so before was because it was a very
confidential matter. At this point the lieutenant stopped and Peyrol
made no sign. Inwardly he was asking himself what the lieutenant was
driving at. But the lieutenant seemed to have shifted his ground. His
tone, too, was slightly different. More practical.

“You say you have made a study of that English ship’s movements. Well,
for instance, suppose a breeze springs up, as it very likely will
towards the evening, could you tell me where she will be to-night? I
mean, what her captain is likely to do.”

“No, I couldn’t,” said Peyrol.

“But you said you have been observing him minutely for weeks. There
aren’t so many alternatives, and taking the weather and everything into
consideration, you can judge almost with certainty.”

“No,” said Peyrol again. “It so happens that I can’t.”

“Can’t you? Then you are worse than any of the old admirals that you
think so little of. Why can’t you?”

“I will tell you why,” said Peyrol after a pause and with a face more
like a carving than ever. “It’s because the fellow has never come so far
this way before. Therefore I don’t know what he has got in his mind, and
in consequence I can’t guess what he will do next. I may be able to tell
you some other day but not to-day. Next time when you come ... to see
the old gunner.”

“No, it must be this time.”

“Do you mean you are going to stay here to-night?”

“Did you think I was here on leave? I tell you I am on service. Don’t
you believe me?”

Peyrol let out a heavy sigh. “Yes, I believe you. And so they are
thinking of catching her alive. And you are sent on service. Well, that
doesn’t make it any easier for me to see you here.”

“You are a strange man, Peyrol,” said the lieutenant, “I believe you
wish me dead.”

“No. Only out of this. But you are right. Peyrol is no friend either to
your face or to your voice. They have done harm enough already.”

They had never attained to such intimate terms before. There was no need
for them to look at each other. The lieutenant thought: “Ah! he can’t
keep his jealousy in.” There was no scorn or malice in that thought. It
was much more like despair. He said mildly:

“You snarl like an old dog, Peyrol.”

“I have felt sometimes as if I could fly at your throat,” said Peyrol in
a sort of calm whisper. “And it amuses you the more.”

“Amuses me. Do I look light-hearted?”

Again Peyrol turned his head slowly for a long, steady stare. And again
the naval officer and the rover gazed at each other with a searching and
sombre frankness. This new-born intimacy could go no further.

“Listen to me, Peyrol....”

“No,” said the other. “If you want to talk, talk to the gunner.”

Though he seemed to have adopted the notion of a double personality, the
rover did not seem to be much easier in one character than in the other.
Furrows of perplexity appeared on his brow, and as the lieutenant did
not speak at once, Peyrol the gunner asked impatiently:

“So they are thinking of catching her alive.” It did not please him to
hear the lieutenant say that it was not exactly this that the chiefs in
Toulon had in their minds. Peyrol at once expressed the opinion that of
all the naval chiefs that ever were, Citizen Renaud was the only one
that was worth anything. Lieutenant Réal, disregarding the challenging
tone, kept to the point.

“What they want to know is whether that English corvette interferes much
with the coast traffic.”

“No, she doesn’t,” said Peyrol, “she leaves poor people alone unless, I
suppose, some craft acts suspiciously. I have seen her give chase to one
or two. But even those she did not detain. Michel--you know Michel?--has
heard from the mainland people that she has captured several at various
times. Of course, strictly speaking, nobody is safe.”

“Well, no. I wonder now what that Englishman would call ‘acting
suspiciously.’”

“Ah, now you are asking something. Don’t you know what an Englishman is?
One day easy and casual, next day ready to pounce on you like a tiger.
Hard in the morning, careless in the afternoon, and only reliable in a
fight, whether with or against you, but for the rest perfectly
fantastic. You might think a little touched in the head, and there again
it would not do to trust to that notion either.”

The lieutenant lending an attentive ear, Peyrol smoothed his brow and
discoursed with gusto of Englishmen as if they had been a strange, very
little-known tribe. “In a manner of speaking,” he concluded, “the oldest
bird of them all can be caught with chaff, but not every day.” He shook
his head, smiling to himself faintly, as if remembering a quaint passage
or two.

“You didn’t get all that knowledge of the English while you were a
gunner,” observed the lieutenant dryly.

“There you go again,” said Peyrol. “And what’s that to you where I
learned it all? Suppose I learned it all from a man who is dead now. Put
it down to that.”

“I see. It amounts to this, that one can’t get at the back of their
minds very easily.”

“No,” said Peyrol, then added grumpily, “and some Frenchmen are not much
better. I wish I could get at the back of your mind.”

“You would find a service matter there, gunner, that’s what you would
find there, and a matter that seems nothing much at first sight, but
when you look into it, is about as difficult to manage properly as
anything you ever undertook in your life. It puzzled all the big-wigs.
It must have, since I was called in. Of course I work on shore at the
Admiralty, and I was in the way. They showed me the order from Paris and
I could see at once the difficulty of it. I pointed it out and I was
told....”

“To come here,” struck in Peyrol.

“No. To make arrangements to carry it out.”

“And you began by coming here. You are always coming here.”

“I began by looking for a man,” said the naval officer with emphasis.

Peyrol looked at him searchingly. “Do you mean to say that in the whole
fleet you couldn’t have found a man?”

“I never attempted to look for one there. My chief agreed with me that
it isn’t a service for navy men.”

“Well, it must be something nasty for a naval man to admit that much.
What is the order? I don’t suppose you came over here without being
ready to show it to me.”

The lieutenant plunged his hand into the inside pocket of his naval
jacket and then brought it out empty.

“Understand, Peyrol,” he said earnestly, “this is not a service of
fighting. Good men are plentiful for that. The object is to play the
enemy a trick.”

“Trick?” said Peyrol in a judicial tone, “that’s all right. I have seen
in the Indian seas Monsieur Surcouf play tricks on the English ... seen
them with my own eyes, deceptions, disguises, and such-like.... That’s
quite sound in war.”

“Certainly. The order for this one comes from the First Consul himself,
for it is no small matter. It’s to deceive the English Admiral.”

“What--that Nelson? Ah! but he is a cunning one.”

After expressing that opinion the old rover pulled out a red bandana
handkerchief and after rubbing his face with it, repeated his opinion
deliberately: “Celui-là est un malin.”

This time the lieutenant really brought out a paper from his pocket and
saying, “I have copied the order for you to see,” handed it to the
rover, who took it from him with a doubtful air.

Lieutenant Réal watched old Peyrol handling it at arm’s length, then
with his arm bent trying to adjust the distance to his eyesight, and
wondered whether he had copied it in a hand big enough to be read easily
by the gunner Peyrol. The order ran like this: “You will make up a
packet of dispatches and pretended private letters as if from officers,
containing a clear statement besides hints calculated to convince the
enemy that the destination of the fleet now fitting in Toulon is for
Egypt and generally for the East. That packet you will send by sea in
some small craft to Naples, taking care that the vessel should fall into
the enemy’s hands.” The Préfet Maritime had called Réal, had shown him
the paragraph of the letter from Paris, had turned the page over and
laid his finger on the signature, “Bonaparte.” Then, after giving him a
meaning glance, the admiral locked up the paper in a drawer and put the
key in his pocket. Lieutenant Réal had written the passage down from
memory directly the notion of consulting Peyrol had occurred to him.

The rover, screwing his eyes and pursing his lips, had come to the end
of it. The lieutenant extended his hand negligently and took the paper
away: “Well, what do you think?” he asked. “You understand that there
can be no question of any ship of war being sacrificed to that dodge.
What do you think of it?”

“Easier said than done,” opined Peyrol curtly.

“That’s what I told my admiral.”

“Is he a lubber, so that you had to explain it to him?”

“No, gunner, he is not. He listened to me, nodding his head.”

“And what did he say when you finished?”

“He said: ‘Parfaitement. Have you got any ideas about it?’ And I
said--listen to me, gunner--I said: ‘Oui, mon Amiral, I think I’ve got a
man,’ and the admiral interrupted me at once: ‘All right, you don’t want
to talk to me about him, I put you in charge of that affair and give you
a week to arrange it. When it’s done report to me. Meantime you may just
as well take this packet.’ They were already prepared, Peyrol, all those
faked letters and dispatches. I carried it out of the admiral’s room, a
parcel done up in sail-cloth, properly corded and sealed. I have had it
in my possession for three days. It’s upstairs in my valise.”

“That doesn’t advance you very much,” growled old Peyrol.

“No,” admitted the lieutenant. “I can also dispose of a few thousand
francs.”

“Francs,” repeated Peyrol. “Well, you had better get back to Toulon and
try to bribe some man to put his head into the jaws of the English
lion.”

Réal reflected, then said slowly, “I wouldn’t tell any man that. Of
course a service of danger, that would be understood.”

“It would be. And if you could get a fellow with some sense in his
caboche, he would naturally try to slip past the English fleet and maybe
do it, too. And then where’s your trick?”

“We could give him a course to steer.”

“Yes. And it may happen that your course would just take him clear of
all Nelson’s fleet, for you never can tell what the English are doing.
They might be watering in Sardinia.”

“Some cruisers are sure to be out and pick him up.”

“Maybe. But that’s not doing the job, that’s taking a chance. Do you
think you are talking to a toothless baby--or what?”

“No, my gunner. It will take a strong man’s teeth to undo that knot.” A
moment of silence followed. Then Peyrol assumed a dogmatic tone.

“I will tell you what it is, lieutenant. This seems to me just the sort
of order that a land-lubber would give to good seamen. You daren’t deny
that.”

“I don’t deny it,” the lieutenant admitted. “And look at the whole
difficulty. For supposing even that the tartane blunders right into the
English fleet, as if it had been indeed arranged, they would just look
into her hold or perhaps poke their noses here and there, but it would
never occur to them to search for dispatches, would it? Our man, of
course, would have them well hidden, wouldn’t he? He is not to know. And
if he were ass enough to leave them lying about the decks, the English
would at once smell a rat there. But what I think he would do would be
to throw the dispatches overboard.”

“Yes--unless he is told the nature of the job,” said Peyrol.

“Evidently. But where’s the bribe big enough to induce a man to taste of
the English pontoons?”

“The man will take the bribe all right and then will do his best not to
be caught; and if he can’t avoid that, he will take jolly good care that
the English should find nothing on board his tartane. Oh no, lieutenant,
any damn scallywag that owns a tartane will take a couple of thousand
francs from your hand as tame as can be; but as to deceiving the English
Admiral, it’s the very devil of an affair. Didn’t you think of all that
before you spoke to the big epaulettes that gave you the job?”

“I did see it, and I put it all before him,” the lieutenant said,
lowering his voice still more, for their conversation had been carried
on in undertones though the house behind them was silent and solitude
reigned round the approaches of Escampobar Farm. It was the hour of
siesta--for those that could sleep. The lieutenant, edging closer
towards the old man, almost breathed the words in his ear.

“What I wanted was to hear you say all those things. Do you understand
now what I meant this morning on the lookout? Don’t you remember what I
said?”

Peyrol, gazing into space, spoke in a level murmur.

“I remember a naval officer trying to shake old Peyrol off his feet and
not managing to do it. I may be _disparu_ but I am too solid yet for any
blancbec that loses his temper, devil only knows why. And it’s a good
thing that you didn’t manage it, else I would have taken you down with
me, and we would have made our last somersault together for the
amusement of an English ship’s company. A pretty end that!”

“Don’t you remember me saying, when you mentioned that the English would
have sent a boat to go through our pockets, that this would have been
the perfect way?” In his stony immobility, with the other man leaning
towards his ear, Peyrol seemed a mere insensible receptacle for
whispers, and the lieutenant went on forcibly: “Well, it was in allusion
to this affair, for, look here, gunner, what could be more convincing,
if they had found the packet of dispatches on me! What would have been
their surprise, their wonder! Not the slightest doubt could enter their
heads. Could it, gunner? Of course it couldn’t. I can imagine the
captain of that corvette crowding sail on her to get this packet into
the admiral’s hands. The secret of the Toulon fleet’s destination found
on the body of a dead officer. Wouldn’t they have exulted at their
enormous piece of luck! But they wouldn’t have called it accidental. Oh
no! They would have called it providential. I know the English a little
too. They like to have God on their side--the only ally they never need
pay a subsidy to. Come, gunner, would it not have been a perfect way?”

Lieutenant Réal threw himself back, and Peyrol, still like a carven
image of grim dreaminess, growled softly:

“Time yet. The English ship is still in the Passe.” He waited a little
in his uncanny living-statue manner before he added viciously: “You
don’t seem in a hurry to go and take that leap.”

“Upon my word, I am almost sick enough of life to do it,” the lieutenant
said in a conversational tone.

“Well, don’t forget to run upstairs and take that packet with you before
you go,” said Peyrol as before. “But don’t wait for me, I am not sick of
life. I am _disparu_, and that’s good enough. There’s no need for me to
die.”

And at last he moved in his seat, swung his head from side to side as if
to make sure that his neck had not been turned to stone, emitted a short
laugh, and grumbled: “_Disparu!_ Hein! Well, I am damned!” as if the
word “vanished” had been a gross insult to enter against a man’s name in
a register. It seemed to rankle, as Lieutenant Réal observed with some
surprise; or else it was something inarticulate that rankled,
manifesting itself in that funny way. The lieutenant, too, had a moment
of anger which flamed and went out at once in the deadly cold
philosophic reflection: “We are victims of the destiny which has brought
us together.” Then again his resentment flamed. Why should he have
stumbled against that girl or that woman, he didn’t know how he must
think of her, and suffer so horribly for it? He who had endeavoured
almost from a boy to destroy all the softer feelings within himself. His
changing moods of distaste, of wonder at himself and at the unexpected
turns of life, wore the aspect of profound abstraction, from which he
was recalled by an outburst of Peyrol’s, not loud but fierce enough.

“No,” cried Peyrol, “I am too old to break my bones for the sake of a
lubberly soldier in Paris who fancies he has invented something clever.”

“I don’t ask you to,” the lieutenant said, with extreme severity, in
what Peyrol would call an epaulette-wearer’s voice. “You old sea-bandit.
And it wouldn’t be for the sake of a soldier anyhow. You and I are
Frenchmen after all.”

“You have discovered that, have you?”

“Yes,” said Réal. “This morning, listening to your talk on the hillside
with that English corvette within one might say a stone’s throw.”

“Yes,” groaned Peyrol. “A French-built ship!” He struck his breast a
resounding blow. “It hurts one there to see her. It seemed to me I could
jump down on her deck single-handed.”

“Yes, there you and I understood each other,” said the lieutenant. “But
look here, this affair is a much bigger thing than getting back a
captured corvette. In reality it is much more than merely playing a
trick on an admiral. It’s a part of a deep plan, Peyrol! It’s another
stroke to help us on the way towards a great victory at sea.”

“Us!” said Peyrol. “I am a sea-bandit and you are a sea-officer. What do
you mean by us?”

“I mean all Frenchmen,” said the lieutenant. “Or, let us say simply
France, which you too have served.”

Peyrol, whose stone-effigy bearing had become humanized almost against
his will, gave an appreciative nod and said: “You’ve got something in
your mind. Now what is it? If you will trust a sea-bandit.”

“No, I will trust a gunner of the Republic. It occurred to me that for
this great affair we could make use of this corvette that you have been
observing so long. For to count on the capture of any old tartane by the
fleet in a way that would not arouse suspicion is no use.”

“A lubberly notion,” assented Peyrol, with more heartiness than he had
ever displayed towards Lieutenant Réal.

“Yes, but there’s that corvette. Couldn’t something be arranged to make
them swallow the whole thing, somehow, some way. You laugh.... Why?”

“I laugh because it would be a great joke,” said Peyrol, whose hilarity
was very short-lived. “That fellow on board, he thinks himself very
clever. I never set my eyes on him, but I used to feel that I knew him
as if he were my own brother; but now....”

He stopped short. Lieutenant Réal, after observing the sudden change on
his countenance, said in an impressive manner:

“I think you have just had an idea.”

“Not the slightest,” said Peyrol, turning suddenly into stone, as if by
enchantment. The lieutenant did not feel discouraged, and he was not
surprised to hear the effigy of Peyrol pronounce: “All the same one
could see.” Then very abruptly: “You meant to stay here to-night?”

“Yes. I will only go down to Madrague and leave word with the sailing
barge which was to come to-day from Toulon to go back without me.”

“No, lieutenant. You must return to Toulon to-day. When you get there
you must turn out some of those damned quill-drivers at the Port Office
if it were midnight and have papers made out for a tartane--oh, any name
you like. Some sort of papers. And then you must come back as soon as
you can. Why not go down to Madrague now and see whether the barge isn’t
already there? If she is, then by starting at once you may get back here
some time about midnight.”

He got up impetuously, and the lieutenant stood up too. Hesitation was
imprinted on his whole attitude. Peyrol’s aspect was not animated, but
his Roman face with its severe aspect gave him a great air of authority.

“Won’t you tell me something more,” asked the lieutenant.

“No,” said the rover. “Not till we meet again. If you return during the
night don’t you try to get into the house. Wait outside. Don’t rouse
anybody. I will be about, and if there is anything to say I will say it
to you then. What are you looking about you for? You don’t want to go up
for your valise. Your pistols up in your room too? What do you want with
pistols, only to go to Toulon and back with a naval boat’s crew?” He
actually laid his hand on the lieutenant’s shoulder and impelled him
gently towards the track leading to Madrague. Réal turned his head at
the touch and their eyes met with the strained closeness of a wrestler’s
hug. It was the lieutenant who gave way before the unflinchingly direct
stare of the old Brother of the Coast. He gave way under the cover of a
sarcastic smile and a very airy “I see you want me out of the way for
some reason or other,” which produced not the slightest effect upon
Peyrol, who stood with his arm pointing towards Madrague. When the
lieutenant turned his back on him Peyrol’s pointing arm fell down by his
side; but he watched the lieutenant out of sight before he turned too
and moved in a contrary direction.




IX


On losing sight of the perplexed lieutenant, Peyrol discovered that his
own mind was a perfect blank. He started to get down to his tartane
after one sidelong look at the face of the house which contained quite a
different problem. Let that wait. His head feeling strangely empty, he
felt the pressing necessity of furnishing it with some thought without
loss of time. He scrambled down steep places, caught at bushes, stepped
from stone to stone, with the assurance of long practice, with
mechanical precision and without for a moment relaxing his efforts to
capture some definite scheme which he could put into his head. To his
right the cove lay full of pale light, while the rest of the
Mediterranean extended beyond it in a dark, unruffled blue. Peyrol was
making for the little basin where his tartane had been hidden for years,
like a jewel in a casket meant only for the secret rejoicing of his eye,
of no more practical use than a miser’s hoard--and as precious! Coming
upon a hollow in the ground where grew a few bushes and even a few
blades of grass, Peyrol sat down to rest. In that position his visible
world was limited to a stony slope, a few boulders, the bush against
which he leaned and the vista of a piece of empty sea-horizon. He
perceived that he detested that lieutenant much more when he didn’t see
him. There was something in the fellow. Well, at any rate he had got rid
of him for, say, eight or ten hours. An uneasiness came over the old
rover, a sense of the endangered stability of things, which was anything
but welcome. He wondered at it, and the thought “I am growing old”
intruded on him again. And yet he was aware of his sturdy body. He could
still creep stealthily like an Indian and with his trusty cudgel knock a
man over with a certain aim at the back of his head, and with force
enough to fell him like a bullock. He had done that thing no further
back than two o’clock the night before, not twelve hours ago, as easy as
easy and without an undue sense of exertion. This fact cheered him up.
But still he could not find an idea for his head. Not what one could
call a real idea. It wouldn’t come. It was no use sitting there.

He got up and after a few strides came to a stony ridge from which he
could see the two white blunt mastheads of his tartane. Her hull was
hidden from him by the formation of the shore, in which the most
prominent feature was a big flat piece of rock. That was the spot on
which not twelve hours before Peyrol, unable to rest in his bed and
coming to seek sleep in his tartane, had seen by moonlight a man
standing above his vessel and looking down at her, a characteristic
forked black shape that certainly had no business to be there. Peyrol,
by a sudden and logical deduction, had said to himself: “Landed from an
English boat.” Why, how, wherefore, he did not stay to consider. He
acted at once like a man accustomed for many years to meet emergencies
of the most unexpected kind. The dark figure, lost in a sort of
attentive amazement, heard nothing, suspected nothing. The impact of the
thick end of the cudgel came down on its head like a thunderbolt from
the blue. The sides of the little basin echoed the crash. But he could
not have heard it. The force of the blow flung the senseless body over
the edge of the flat rock and down headlong into the open hold of the
tartane, which received it with the sound of a muffled drum. Peyrol
could not have done the job better at the age of twenty. No. Not so
well. There was swiftness, mature judgment--and the sound of the muffled
drum was followed by a perfect silence, without a sigh, without a moan.
Peyrol ran round a little promontory to where the shore shelved down to
the level of the tartane’s rail and got on board. And still the silence
remained perfect in the cold moonlight and amongst the deep shadows of
the rocks. It remained perfect because Michel, who always slept under
the half-deck forward, being wakened by the thump which had made the
whole tartane tremble, had lost the power of speech. With his head just
protruding from under the half-deck, arrested on all fours and shivering
violently like a dog that had been washed with hot water, he was kept
from advancing further by his terror of this bewitched corpse that had
come on board flying through the air. He would not have touched it for
anything.

The “You there, Michel,” pronounced in an undertone, acted like a moral
tonic. This then was not the doing of the Evil One; it was no sorcery!
And even if it had been, now that Peyrol was there, Michel had lost all
fear. He ventured not a single question while he helped Peyrol to turn
over the limp body. Its face was covered with blood from the cut on the
forehead which it had got by striking the sharp edge of the keelson.
What accounted for the head not being completely smashed and for no
limbs being broken was the fact that on its way through the air the
victim of undue curiosity had come in contact with and had snapped like
a carrot one of the foremast shrouds. Raising his eyes casually, Peyrol
noticed the broken rope, and at once put his hand on the man’s breast.

“His heart beats yet,” he murmured. “Go and light the cabin lamp,
Michel.”

“You going to take that thing into the cabin?”

“Yes,” said Peyrol. “The cabin is used to that kind of thing,” and
suddenly he felt very bitter. “It has been a death-trap for better
people than this fellow, whoever he is.”

While Michel was away executing that order Peyrol’s eyes roamed all over
the shores of the basin, for he could not divest himself of the idea
that there must be more Englishmen dodging about. That one of the
corvette’s boats was still in the cove he had not the slightest doubt.
As to the motive of her coming, it was incomprehensible. Only that
senseless form lying at his feet could perhaps have told him: but Peyrol
had little hope that it would ever speak again. If his friends started
to look for their shipmate there was just a bare chance that they would
not discover the existence of the basin. Peyrol stooped and felt the
body all over. He found no weapon of any kind on it. There was only a
common clasp-knife on a lanyard round its neck.

That soul of obedience, Michel, returning from aft, was directed to
throw a couple of bucketfuls of salt water upon the bloody head with its
face upturned to the moon. The lowering of the body down into the cabin
was a matter of some little difficulty. It was heavy. They laid it full
length on a locker, and after Michel with a strange tidiness had
arranged its arms along its sides it looked incredibly rigid. The
dripping head with soaked hair was like the head of a drowned man with a
gaping pink gash on the forehead.

“Go on deck to keep a lookout,” said Peyrol. “We may have to fight yet
before the night’s out.”

After Michel left him Peyrol began by flinging off his jacket and,
without a pause, dragging his shirt off over his head. It was a very
fine shirt. The Brothers of the Coast in their hours of ease were by no
means a ragged crowd, and Peyrol the gunner had preserved a taste for
fine linen. He tore the shirt into long strips, sat down on the locker
and took the wet head on his knees. He bandaged it with some skill,
working as calmly as though he had been practising on a dummy. Then the
experienced Peyrol sought the lifeless hand and felt the pulse. The
spirit had not fled yet. The rover, stripped to the waist, his powerful
arms folded on the grizzled pelt of his bare breast, sat gazing down at
the inert face in his lap with the eyes closed peacefully under the
white band covering the forehead. He contemplated the heavy jaw combined
oddly with a certain roundness of cheek, the noticeably broad nose with
a sharp tip and a faint dent across the bridge, either natural or the
result of some old injury. A face of brown clay, roughly modelled, with
a lot of black eyelashes stuck on the closed lids and looking
artificially youthful on that physiognomy forty years old or more. And
Peyrol thought of his youth. Not his own youth; that he was never
anxious to recapture. It was of that man’s youth that he thought, of how
that face had looked twenty years ago. Suddenly he shifted his position,
and putting his lips to the ear of that inanimate head, yelled with all
the force of his lungs:

“Hullo! Hullo! Wake up, shipmate!”

It seemed enough to wake up the dead. A faint “Voilà! Voilà!” was the
answer from a distance, and presently Michel put his head into the cabin
with an anxious grin and a gleam in the round eyes.

“You called, maître?”

“Yes,” said Peyrol. “Come along and help me to shift him.”

“Overboard?” murmured Michel readily.

“No,” said Peyrol, “into that bunk. Steady! Don’t bang his head,” he
cried with unexpected tenderness. “Throw a blanket over him. Stay in the
cabin and keep his bandages wetted with salt water. I don’t think
anybody will trouble you to-night. I am going to the house.”

“The day is not very far off,” remarked Michel.

This was one reason the more why Peyrol was in a hurry to get back to
the house and steal up to his room unseen. He drew on his jacket over
his bare skin, picked up his cudgel, recommended Michel not to let that
strange bird get out of the cabin on any account. As Michel was
convinced that the man would never walk again in his life, he received
those instructions without particular emotion.

The dawn had broken some time before Peyrol, on his way up to Escampobar
happened to look round and had the luck to actually see with his own
eyes the English man-of-war’s boat pulling out of the cove. This
confirmed his surmises but did not enlighten him a bit as to the causes.
Puzzled and uneasy, he approached the house through the farmyard.
Catherine, always the first up, stood at the open kitchen door. She
moved aside and would have let him pass without remark, if Peyrol
himself had not asked in a whisper: “Anything new?” She answered him in
the same tone: “She has taken to roaming at night.” Peyrol stole
silently up to his bedroom, from which he descended an hour later as
though he had spent all the night in his bed up there.

It was this nocturnal adventure which had affected the character of
Peyrol’s forenoon talk with the lieutenant. What with one thing and
another, he found it very trying. Now that he had got rid of Réal for
several hours, the rover had to turn his attention to that other invader
of the strained, questionable, and ominous in its origins, peace of the
Escampobar Farm. As he sat on the flat rock with his eyes fixed idly on
the few drops of blood betraying his last night’s work to the high
heaven, and trying to get hold of something definite that he could think
about, Peyrol became aware of a faint thundering noise. Faint as it was,
it filled the whole basin. He soon guessed its nature, and his face lost
its perplexity. He picked up his cudgel, got on his feet briskly,
muttering to himself, “He’s anything but dead,” and hurried on board the
tartane.

On the after-deck Michel was keeping a lookout. He had carried out the
orders he had received by the well. Besides being secured by the very
obvious padlock, the cabin door was shored up by a spar which made it
stand as firm as a rock. The thundering noise seemed to issue from its
immovable substance magically. It ceased for a moment, and a sort of
distracted continuous growling could be heard. Then the thundering began
again. Michel reported:

“This is the third time he starts this game.”

“Not much strength in this,” remarked Peyrol gravely.

“That he can do it at all is a miracle,” said Michel, showing a certain
excitement. “He stands on the ladder and beats the door with his fists.
He is getting better. He began about half an hour after I got back on
board. He drummed for a bit and then fell off the ladder. I heard him. I
had my ear against the scuttle. He lay there and talked to himself for a
long time. Then he went at it again.” Peyrol approached the scuttle
while Michel added his opinion: “He will go on like that for ever. You
can’t stop him.”

“Easy there,” said Peyrol, in a deep authoritative voice. “Time you
finish that noise.”

These words brought instantly a deathlike silence. Michel ceased to
grin. He wondered at the power of these few words of a foreign language.

Peyrol himself smiled faintly. It was ages since he had uttered a
sentence of English. He waited complacently until Michel had unbarred
and unlocked the door of the cabin. After it was thrown open he boomed
out a warning: “Stand clear!” and, turning about, went down with great
deliberation, ordering Michel to go forward and keep a lookout.

Down there the man with the bandaged head was hanging on to the table
and swearing feebly without intermission. Peyrol, after listening for a
time with an air of interested recognition, as one would to a tune heard
many years ago, stopped it by a deep-voiced:

“That will do.” After a short silence he added: “You look bien malade,
hein? What you call sick,” in a tone which if not tender was certainly
not hostile. “We will remedy that.”

“Who are you?” asked the prisoner, looking frightened and throwing his
arm up quickly to guard his head against the coming blow. But Peyrol’s
uplifted hand fell only on his shoulder in a hearty slap which made him
sit down suddenly on a locker in a partly collapsed attitude and unable
to speak. But though very much dazed, he was able to watch Peyrol open a
cupboard and produce from there a small demijohn and two tin cups. He
took heart to say plaintively: “My throat’s like tinder,” and then
suspiciously: “Was it you who broke my head?”

“It was me,” admitted Peyrol, sitting down on the opposite side of the
table and leaning back to look at his prisoner comfortably.

“What the devil did you do that for?” inquired the other with a sort of
faint fierceness which left Peyrol unmoved.

“Because you put your nose where you no business. Understand? I see you
there under the moon, penché, eating my tartane with your eyes. You
never hear me, hein?”

“I believe you walked on air. Did you mean to kill me?”

“Yes, in preference to letting you go and make a story of it on board
your cursed corvette.”

“Well then, now’s your chance to finish me. I am as weak as a kitten.”

“How did you say that? Kitten? Ha, ha, ha,” laughed Peyrol. “You make a
nice petit chat.” He seized the demijohn by the neck and filled the
mugs. “There,” he went on, pushing one towards the prisoner--“it’s good
drink--that.”

Symons’ state was as though the blow had robbed him of all power of
resistance, of all faculty of surprise and generally of all the means by
which a man may assert himself, except bitter resentment. His head was
aching, it seemed to him enormous, too heavy for his neck and as if full
of hot smoke. He took a drink under Peyrol’s fixed gaze and with
uncertain movements put down the mug. He looked drowsy for a moment.
Presently a little colour deepened his bronze; he hitched himself up on
the locker and said in a strong voice:

“You played a damned dirty trick on me. Call yourself a man, walking on
air behind a fellow’s back and felling him like a bullock.”

Peyrol nodded calmly and sipped from his mug.

“If I had met you anywhere else but looking at my tartane I would have
done nothing to you. I would have permitted you to go back to your boat.
Where was your damned boat?”

“How can I tell you? I can’t tell where I am. I’ve never been here
before. How long have I been here?”

“Oh, about fourteen hours,” said Peyrol.

“My head feels as if it would fall off if I moved,” grumbled the
other.... “You are a damned bungler, that’s what you are.”

“What for--bungler?”

“For not finishing me off at once.”

He seized the mug and emptied it down his throat. Peyrol drank too,
observing him all the time. He put the mug down with extreme gentleness
and said slowly:

“How could I know it was you? I hit hard enough to crack the skull of
any other man.”

“What do you mean? What do you know about my skull? What are you driving
at? I don’t know you, you white-headed villain, going about at night
knocking people on the head from behind. Did you do for our officer,
too?”

“Oh yes! Your officer. What was he up to? What trouble did you people
come to make here, anyhow?”

“Do you think they tell a boat’s crew? Go and ask our officer. He went
up the gully and our coxswain got the jumps. He says to me: ‘You are
lightfooted, Sam,’ says he; ‘you just creep round the head of the cove
and see if our boat can be seen across from the other side.’ Well, I
couldn’t see anything. That was all right. But I thought I would climb a
little higher amongst the rocks....”

He paused drowsily.

“That was a silly thing to do,” remarked Peyrol in an encouraging voice.

“I would’ve sooner expected to see an elephant inland than a craft lying
in a pool that seemed no bigger than my hand. Could not understand how
she got there. Couldn’t help going down to find out--and the next thing
I knew I was lying on my back with my head tied up, in a bunk in this
kennel of a cabin here. Why couldn’t you have given me a hail and
engaged me properly, yardarm to yardarm? You would have got me all the
same, because all I had in the way of weapons was the clasp-knife which
you have looted off me.”

“Up on the shelf there,” said Peyrol, looking round. “No, my friend, I
wasn’t going to take the risk of seeing you spread your wings and fly.”

“You need not have been afraid for your tartane. Our boat was after no
tartane. We wouldn’t have taken your tartane for a gift. Why, we see
them by dozens every day--those tartanes.”

Peyrol filled the two mugs again. “Ah,” he said, “I dare say you see
many tartanes, but this one is not like the others. You a sailor--and
you couldn’t see that she was something extraordinary.”

“Hellfire and gunpowder!” cried the other. “How can you expect me to
have seen anything. I just noticed that her sails were bent before your
club hit me on the head.” He raised his hands to his head and groaned.
“Oh lord, I feel as though I had been drunk for a month.”

Peyrol’s prisoner did look somewhat as though he had got his head broken
in a drunken brawl. But to Peyrol his appearance was not repulsive. The
rover preserved a tender memory of his freebooter’s life with its
lawless spirit and its spacious scene of action, before the change in
the state of affairs in the Indian Ocean, the astounding rumours from
the outer world, made him reflect on its precarious character. It was
true that he had deserted the French flag when quite a youngster; but at
that time that flag was white; and now it was a flag of three colours.
He had known the practice of liberty, equality and fraternity as
understood in the haunts, open or secret, of the Brotherhood of the
Coast. So the change, if one could believe what people talked about,
could not be very great. The rover had also his own positive notions as
to what these three words were worth. Liberty--to hold your own in the
world if you could. Equality--yes! But no body of men ever accomplished
anything without a chief. All this was worth what it was worth. He
regarded fraternity somewhat differently. Of course brothers would
quarrel amongst themselves; it was during a fierce quarrel that flamed
up suddenly in a company of Brothers that he had received the most
dangerous wound of his life. But for that Peyrol nursed no grudge
against anybody. In his view the claim of the Brotherhood was a claim
for help against the outside world. And here he was sitting opposite a
Brother whose head he had broken on sufficient grounds. There he was
across the table looking dishevelled and dazed, uncomprehending and
aggrieved, and that head of his proved as hard as ages ago when the
nickname of Testa Dura had been given to him by a Brother of Italian
origin on some occasion or other, some butting match no doubt; just as
he, Peyrol himself, was known for a time on both sides of the Mozambique
Channel as Poigne-de-Fer, after an incident when in the presence of the
Brothers he played at arm’s length with the windpipe of an obstreperous
negro sorcerer with an enormous girth of chest. The villagers brought
out food with alacrity, and the sorcerer was never the same man again.
It had been a great display.

Yes, no doubt it was Testa Dura; the young neophyte of the order (where
and how picked up Peyrol never heard), strange to the camp,
simple-minded and much impressed by the swaggering cosmopolitan company
in which he found himself. He had attached himself to Peyrol in
preference to some of his own countrymen, of whom there were several in
that band, and used to run after him like a little dog and certainly had
acted a good shipmate’s part on the occasion of that wound, which had
neither killed nor cowed Peyrol but merely had given him an opportunity
to reflect at leisure on the conduct of his own life.

The first suspicion of that amazing fact had intruded on Peyrol while he
was bandaging that head by the light of the smoky lamp. Since the fellow
still lived, it was not in Peyrol to finish him off or let him lie
unattended like a dog. And then this was a sailor. His being English was
no obstacle to the development of Peyrol’s mixed feelings in which
hatred certainly had no place. Amongst the members of the Brotherhood it
was the Englishmen whom he preferred. He had also found amongst them
that particular and loyal appreciation, which a Frenchman of character
and ability will receive from Englishmen sooner than from any other
nation. Peyrol had at times been a leader, without ever trying for it
very much, for he was not ambitious. The lead used to fall to him mostly
at a time of crisis of some sort; and when he had got the lead it was on
the Englishmen that he used to depend most.

And so that youngster had turned into this English man-of-war’s man! In
the fact itself there was nothing impossible. You found Brothers of the
Coast in all sorts of ships and in all sorts of places. Peyrol had found
one once in a very ancient and hopeless cripple practising the
profession of a beggar on the steps of Manila cathedral, and had left
him the richer by two broad gold pieces to add to his secret hoard.
There was a tale of a Brother of the Coast having become a mandarin in
China, and Peyrol believed it. One never knew where and in what position
one would find a Brother of the Coast. The wonderful thing was that
this one should have come to seek him out, to put himself in the way of
his cudgel. Peyrol’s greatest concern had been all through that Sunday
morning to conceal the whole adventure from Lieutenant Réal. As against
a wearer of epaulettes, mutual protection was the first duty between
Brothers of the Coast. The unexpectedness of that claim coming to him
after twenty years invested it with an extraordinary strength. What he
would do with the fellow he didn’t know. But since that morning the
situation had changed. Peyrol had received the lieutenant’s confidence
and had got on terms with him in a special way. He fell into profound
thought.

“Sacrée tête dure,” he muttered without rousing himself. Peyrol was
annoyed a little at not having been recognized. He could not conceive
how difficult it would have been for Symons to identify this portly
deliberate person with a white head of hair as the object of his
youthful admiration, the black-ringletted French Brother in the prime of
life of whom everybody thought so much. Peyrol was roused by hearing the
other declare suddenly:

“I am an Englishman, I am. I am not going to knuckle under to anybody.
What are you going to do with me?”

“I will do what I please,” said Peyrol, who had been asking himself
exactly the same question.

“Well, then, be quick about it, whatever it is. I don’t care a damn what
you do, but--be--quick--about it.”

He tried to be emphatic; but as a matter of fact the last words came out
in a faltering tone. And old Peyrol was touched. He thought that if he
were to let him drink the mugful standing there, it would make him dead
drunk. But he took the risk. So he said only:

“Allons--drink!” The other did not wait for a second invitation but
could not control very well the movements of his arm extended towards
the mug. Peyrol raised his on high.

“Trinquons, eh?” he proposed. But in his precarious condition the
Englishman remained unforgiving.

“I’m damned if I do,” he said indignantly, but so low that Peyrol had to
turn his ear to catch the words. “You will have to explain to me first
what you meant by knocking me on the head.”

He drank, staring all the time at Peyrol in a manner which was meant to
give offence but which struck Peyrol as so childlike that he burst into
a laugh.

“Sacré imbécile, va! Did I not tell you it was because of the tartane?
If it hadn’t been for the tartane I would have hidden from you. I would
have crouched behind a bush like a--what do you call them?--lièvre.”

The other, who was feeling the effect of the drink, stared with frank
incredulity.

“You are of no account,” continued Peyrol. “Ah! if you had been an
officer I would have gone for you anywhere. Did you say your officer
went up the gully?”

Symons sighed deeply and easily. “That’s the way he went. We had heard
on board of a house thereabouts.”

“Oh, he went to the house!” said Peyrol. “Well, if he did get there he
must be very sorry for himself. There is half a company of infantry
billeted in the farm.”

This inspired fib went down easily with the English sailor. Soldiers
were stationed in many parts of the coast as any seaman of the
blockading fleet knew very well. To the many expressions which had
passed over the face of that man recovering from a long period of
unconsciousness there was added the shade of dismay.

“What the devil have they stuck soldiers on this piece of rock for?” he
asked.

“Oh, signalling post and things like that. I am not likely to tell you
everything. Why! you might escape.”

That phrase reached the soberest spot in the whole of Symons’
individuality. Things were happening, then. Mr. Bolt was a prisoner. But
the main idea evoked in his confused mind was that he would be given up
to those soldiers before very long. The prospect of captivity made his
heart sink, and he resolved to give as much trouble as he could.

“You will have to get some of these soldiers to carry me up. I won’t
walk. I won’t. Not after having had my brains nearly knocked out from
behind. I tell you straight! I won’t walk. Not a step. They will have to
carry me ashore.”

Peyrol only shook his head deprecatingly.

“Now you go and get a corporal with a file of men,” insisted Symons
obstinately. “I want to be made a proper prisoner of. Who the devil are
you? You had no right to interfere. I believe you are a civilian. A
common marinero, whatever you may call yourself. You look to me a pretty
fishy marinero at that. Where did you learn English? In prison--eh? You
ain’t going to keep me in this damned dog-hole, on board your rubbishy
tartane. Go and get that corporal, I tell you.”

He looked suddenly very tired and only murmured: “I am an Englishman, I
am.”

Peyrol’s patience was positively angelic.

“Don’t you talk about the tartane,” he said impressively, making his
words as distinct as possible. “I told you she was not like the other
tartanes. That is because she is a courier boat. Every time she goes to
sea she makes a pied-de-nez, what you call thumb to the nose, to all
your English cruisers. I do not mind telling you because you are my
prisoner. You will soon learn French now.”

“Who are you? The caretaker of this thing or what?” asked the undaunted
Symons. But Peyrol’s mysterious silence seemed to intimidate him at
last. He became dejected and began to curse in a languid tone all boat
expeditions, the coxswain of the gig and his own infernal luck.

Peyrol sat alert and attentive like a man interested in an experiment,
while after a moment Symons’ face began to look as if he had been hit
with a club again, but not as hard as before. A film came over his round
eyes and the words “fishy marinero” made their way out of his lips in a
sort of death-bed voice. Yet such was the hardness of his head that he
actually rallied enough to address Peyrol in an ingratiating tone.

“Come, grandfather!” He tried to push the mug across the table and upset
it. “Come! Let us finish what’s in that tiny bottle of yours.”

“No,” said Peyrol, drawing the demijohn to his side of the table and
putting the cork in.

“No?” repeated Symons in an unbelieving voice and looking at the
demijohn fixedly ... “you must be a tinker.”... He tried to say
something more under Peyrol’s watchful eyes, failed once or twice, and
suddenly pronounced the word “cochon” so correctly as to make old Peyrol
start. After that it was no use looking at him any more. Peyrol busied
himself in locking up the demijohn and the mugs. When he turned round
most of the prisoner’s body was extended over the table and no sound
came from it, not even a snore.

When Peyrol got outside, pulling to the door of the cuddy behind him,
Michel hastened from forward to receive the master’s orders. But Peyrol
stood so long on the after-deck meditating profoundly with his hand over
his mouth that Michel became fidgety and ventured a cheerful: “It looks
as if he were not going to die.”

“He is dead,” said Peyrol with grim jocularity. “Dead drunk. And you
very likely will not see me till to-morrow sometime.”

“But what am I to do?” asked Michel timidly.

“Nothing,” said Peyrol. “Of course you must not let him set fire to the
tartane.”

“But suppose,” insisted Michel, “he should give signs of escaping.”

“If you see him trying to escape,” said Peyrol with mock solemnity,
“then, Michel, it will be a sign for you to get out of his way as
quickly as you can. A man who would try to escape with a head like this
on him would just swallow you at one mouthful.”

He picked up his cudgel and, stepping ashore, went off without as much
as a look at his faithful henchman. Michel listened to him scrambling
amongst the stones, and his habitual amiably vacant face acquired a sort
of dignity from the utter and absolute blankness that came over it.




X


It was only after reaching the level ground in front of the farmhouse
that Peyrol took time to pause and resume his contact with the exterior
world.

While he had been closeted with his prisoner the sky had got covered
with a thin layer of cloud, in one of those swift changes of weather
that are not unusual in the Mediterranean. This grey vapour, drifting
high up, close against the disc of the sun, seemed to enlarge the space
behind its veil, add to the vastness of a shadowless world no longer
hard and brilliant but all softened in the contours of its masses and in
the faint line of the horizon, as if ready to dissolve in the immensity
of the infinite.

Familiar and indifferent to his eyes, material and shadowy, the extent
of the changeable sea had gone pale under the pale sun in a mysterious
and emotional response. Mysterious too was the great oval patch of dark
water to the west; and also a broad blue lane traced on the dull silver
of the waters in a parabolic curve described magistrally by an invisible
finger for a symbol of endless wandering. The face of the farmhouse
might have been the face of a house from which all the inhabitants had
fled suddenly. In the high part of the building the window of the
lieutenant’s room remained open, both glass and shutter. By the door of
the salle the stable fork leaning against the wall seemed to have been
forgotten by the sans-culotte. This aspect of abandonment struck Peyrol
with more force than usual. He had been thinking so hard of all these
people, that to find no one about seemed unnatural and even depressing.
He had seen many abandoned places in his life, grass huts, mud forts,
kings’ palaces--temples from which every white-robed soul had fled.
Temples, however, never looked quite empty. The gods clung to their own.
Peyrol’s eyes rested on the bench against the wall of the salle. In the
usual course of things it should have been occupied by the lieutenant,
who had the habit of sitting there with hardly a movement, for hours,
like a spider watching for the coming of a fly. This paralysing
comparison held Peyrol motionless with a twisted mouth and a frown on
his brow, before the evoked vision, coloured and precise, of the man,
more troubling than the reality had ever been.

He came to himself with a start. What sort of occupation was this, ‘cré
nom de nom, staring at a silly bench with no one on it. Was he going
wrong in his head? Or was it that he was getting really old? He had
noticed old men losing themselves like that. But he had something to do.
First of all he had to go and see what the English sloop in the Passe
was doing.

While he was making his way towards the lookout on the hill where the
inclined pine hung peering over the cliff as if an insatiable curiosity
were holding it in that precarious position, Peyrol had another view
from above of the farmyard and of the buildings and was again affected
by their deserted appearance. Not a soul, not even an animal seemed to
have been left; only on the roofs the pigeons walked with smart
elegance. Peyrol hurried on and presently saw the English ship well over
on the Porquerolles side with her yards braced up and her head to the
southward. There was a little wind in the Passe, while the dull silver
of the open had a darkling rim of rippled water far away to the east in
that quarter where, far or near, but mostly out of sight, the British
fleet kept its endless watch. Not a shadow of a spar or gleam of sail on
the horizon betrayed its presence; but Peyrol would not have been
surprised to see a crowd of ships surge up, people the horizon with
hostile life, come in running, and dot the sea with their ordered groups
all about Cape Cicié, parading their damned impudence. Then indeed that
corvette, the big factor of everyday life on that stretch of coast,
would become very small potatoes indeed; and the man in command of her
(he had been Peyrol’s personal adversary in many imaginary encounters
fought to a finish in the room upstairs)--then indeed that Englishman
would have to mind his steps. He would be ordered to come within hail of
the admiral, be sent here and there, made to run like a little dog and
as likely as not get called on board the flagship and get a dressing
down for something or other.

Peyrol thought for a moment that the impudence of this Englishman was
going to take the form of running along the peninsula and looking into
the very cove; for the corvette’s head was falling off slowly. A fear
for his tartane clutched Peyrol’s heart till he remembered that the
Englishman did not know of her existence. Of course not. His cudgel had
been absolutely effective in stopping that bit of information. The only
Englishman who knew of the existence of the tartane was that fellow
with the broken head. Peyrol actually laughed at his momentary scare.
Moreover, it was evident that the Englishman did not mean to parade in
front of the peninsula. He did not mean to be impudent. The sloop’s
yards were swung right round and she came again to the wind but now
heading to the northward back from where she came. Peyrol saw at once
that the Englishman meant to pass to windward of Cape Esterel, probably
with the intention of anchoring for the night off the long white beach
which in a regular curve closes the roadstead of Hyères on that side.

Peyrol pictured her to himself, on the clouded night, not so very dark,
since the full moon was but a day old, lying at anchor within hail of
the low shore, with her sails furled and looking profoundly asleep, but
with the watch on deck lying by the guns. He gnashed his teeth. It had
come to this at last, that the captain of the _Amelia_ could do nothing
with his ship without putting Peyrol into a rage. Oh, for forty
Brothers, or sixty, picked ones, he thought, to teach the fellow what it
might cost him taking liberties along the French coast! Ships had been
carried by surprise before, on nights when there was just light enough
to see the whites of each other’s eyes in a close tussle. And what would
be the crew of that Englishman? Something between ninety and a hundred
altogether, boys and landsmen included.... Peyrol shook his fist for a
good-bye, just when Cape Esterel shut off the English sloop from his
sight. But in his heart of hearts that seaman of cosmopolitan
associations knew very well that no forty or sixty, not any given
hundred Brothers of the Coast would have been enough to capture that
corvette making herself at home within ten miles of where he had first
opened his eyes to the world.

He shook his head dismally at the leaning pine, his only companion. The
disinherited soul of that rover ranging for so many years a lawless
ocean with the coasts of two continents for a raiding ground, had come
back to its crag, circling like a seabird in the dusk and longing for a
great sea victory for its people: that inland multitude of which Peyrol
knew nothing except the few individuals on that peninsula cut off from
the rest of the land by the dead water of a salt lagoon; and where only
a strain of manliness in a miserable cripple and an unaccountable charm
of a half-crazed woman had found response in his heart.

This scheme of false dispatches was but a detail in a plan for a great,
a destructive victory. Just a detail, but not a trifle all the same.
Nothing connected with the deception of an admiral could be called
trifling. And such an admiral too. It was, Peyrol felt vaguely, a scheme
that only a confounded landsman would invent. It behoved the sailors,
however, to make a workable thing of it. It would have to be worked
through that corvette.

And here Peyrol was brought up by the question that all his life had not
been able to settle for him--and that was whether the English were
really very stupid or very acute. That difficulty had presented itself
with every fresh case. The old rover had enough genius in him to have
arrived at a general conclusion that if they were to be deceived at all
it could not be done very well by words but rather by deeds; not by mere
wriggling, but by deep craft concealed under some sort of
straightforward action. That conviction, however, did not take him
forward in this case, which was one in which much thinking would be
necessary.

The _Amelia_ had disappeared behind Cape Esterel, and Peyrol wondered
with a certain anxiety whether this meant that the Englishman had given
up his man for good. “If he has,” said Peyrol to himself, “I am bound to
see him pass out again from beyond Cape Esterel before it gets dark.”
If, however, he did not see the ship again within the next hour or two,
then she would be anchored off the beach, to wait for the night before
making some attempt to discover what had become of her man. This could
be done only by sending out one or two boats to explore the coast, and
no doubt to enter the cove--perhaps even to land a small search party.

After coming to this conclusion Peyrol began deliberately to charge his
pipe. Had he spared a moment for a glance inland, he might have caught a
whisk of a black skirt, the gleam of a white fichu--Arlette running down
the faint track leading from Escampobar to the village in the hollow;
the same track in fact up which Citizen Scevola, while indulging in the
strange freak to visit the church, had been chased by the incensed
faithful. But Peyrol, while charging and lighting his pipe, had kept his
eyes fastened on Cape Esterel. Then, throwing his arm affectionately
over the trunk of the pine, he had settled himself to watch. Far below
him the roadstead, with its play of grey and bright gleams, looked like
a plaque of mother-of-pearl in a frame of yellow rocks and dark green
ravines set off inland by the masses of the hills displaying the tint of
the finest purple; while above his head the sun behind a cloud-veil hung
like a silver disc.

That afternoon, after waiting in vain for Lieutenant Réal to appear
outside in the usual way, Arlette, the mistress of Escampobar, had gone
unwillingly into the kitchen where Catherine sat upright in a heavy
capacious wooden arm-chair, the back of which rose above the top of her
white muslin cap. Even in her old age, even in her hours of ease,
Catherine preserved the upright carriage of the family that had held
Escampobar for so many generations. It would have been easy to believe
that like some characters famous in the world Catherine would have
wished to die standing up and with unbowed shoulders.

With her sense of hearing undecayed she detected the light footsteps in
the salle long before Arlette entered the kitchen. That woman, who had
faced alone and unaided (except for her brother’s comprehending silence)
the anguish of passion in a forbidden love, and of terrors comparable to
those of the Judgment Day, neither turned her face, quiet without
serenity, nor her eyes, fearless but without fire, in the direction of
her niece.

Arlette glanced on all sides, even at the walls, even at the mound of
ashes under the big overmantel, nursing in its heart a spark of fire,
before she sat down and leaned her elbow on the table.

“You wander about like a soul in pain,” said her aunt, sitting by the
hearth like an old queen on her throne.

“And you sit here eating your heart out.”

“Formerly,” remarked Catherine, “old women like me could always go over
their prayers, but now....”

“I believe you have not been to church for years. I remember Scevola
telling me that a long time ago. Was it because you didn’t like
people’s eyes? I have fancied sometimes that most people in the world
must have been massacred long ago.”

Catherine turned her face away. Arlette rested her head on her
half-closed hand, and her eyes, losing their steadiness, began to
tremble amongst cruel visions. She got up suddenly and caressed the
thin, half-averted, withered cheek with the tips of her fingers, and in
a low voice, with that marvellous cadence that plucked at one’s
heart-strings, she said coaxingly:

“Those were dreams, weren’t they?”

In her immobility the old woman called with all the might of her will
for the presence of Peyrol. She had never been able to shake off a
superstitious fear of that niece restored to her from the terrors of a
Judgment Day in which the world had been given over to the devils. She
was always afraid that this girl, wandering about with restless eyes and
a dim smile on her silent lips, would suddenly say something atrocious,
unfit to be heard, calling for vengeance from heaven, unless Peyrol were
by. That stranger come from “par delà les mers” was out of it
altogether, cared probably for no one in the world but had struck her
imagination by his massive aspect, his deliberation suggesting a mighty
force like the reposeful attitude of a lion. Arlette desisted from
caressing the irresponsive cheek, exclaimed petulantly, “I am awake
now!” and went out of the kitchen without having asked her aunt the
question she had meant to ask, which was whether she knew what had
become of the lieutenant.

Her heart had failed her. She let herself drop on the bench outside the
door of the salle. “What is the matter with them all?” she thought. “I
can’t make them out. What wonder is it that I have not been able to
sleep?” Even Peyrol, so different from all mankind, who from the first
moment when he stood before her had the power to soothe her aimless
unrest, even Peyrol would now sit for hours with the lieutenant on the
bench, gazing into the air and keeping him in talk about things without
sense, as if on purpose to prevent him from thinking of her. Well, he
could not do that. But the enormous change implied in the fact that
every day had a to-morrow now, and that all the people around her had
ceased to be mere phantoms for her wandering glances to glide over
without concern, made her feel the need of support from somebody, from
somewhere. She could have cried aloud for it.

She sprang up and walked along the whole front of the farm building. At
the end of the wall enclosing the orchard she called out in a modulated
undertone: “Eugène,” not because she hoped that the lieutenant was
anywhere within earshot, but for the pleasure of hearing the sound of
the name uttered for once above a whisper. She turned about and at the
end of the wall on the yard side she repeated her call, drinking in the
sound that came from her lips, “Eugène, Eugène,” with a sort of
half-exulting despair. It was in such dizzy moments that she wanted a
steadying support. But all was still. She heard no friendly murmur, not
even a sigh. Above her head under the thin grey sky a big mulberry-tree
stirred no leaf. Step by step, as if unconsciously, she began to move
down the track. At the end of fifty yards she opened the inland view,
the roofs of the village between the green tops of the platanes
overshadowing the fountain, and just beyond the flat blue-grey level of
the salt lagoon, smooth and dull like a slab of lead. But what drew her
on was the church-tower, where, in a round arch, she could see the black
speck of the bell which, escaping the requisitions of the Republican
wars, and dwelling mute above the locked-up empty church, had only
lately recovered its voice. She ran on, but when she had come near
enough to make out the figures moving about the village fountain, she
checked herself, hesitated a moment and then took the footpath leading
to the presbytery.

She pushed open the little gate with the broken latch. The humble
building of rough stones, from between which much mortar had crumbled
out, looked as though it had been sinking slowly into the ground. The
beds of the plot in front were choked with weeds, because the abbé had
no taste for gardening. When the heiress of Escampobar opened the door,
he was walking up and down the largest room which was his bedroom and
sitting-room and where he also took his meals. He was a gaunt man with a
long, as if convulsed, face. In his young days he had been tutor to the
sons of a great noble, but he did not emigrate with his employer.
Neither did he submit to the Republic. He had lived in his native land
like a hunted wild beast, and there had been many tales of his
activities, warlike and others. When the hierarchy was re-established he
found no favour in the eyes of his superiors. He had remained too much
of a royalist. He had accepted, without a word, the charge of this
miserable parish, where he had acquired influence quickly enough. His
sacerdotalism lay in him like a cold passion. Though accessible enough,
he never walked abroad without his breviary, acknowledging the solemnly
bared heads by a curt nod. He was not exactly feared, but some of the
oldest inhabitants who remembered the previous incumbent, an old man who
died in the garden after having been dragged out of bed by some patriots
anxious to take him to prison in Hyères, jerked their heads sideways in
a knowing manner when their curé was mentioned.

On seeing this apparition in an Arlesian cap and silk skirt, a white
fichu, and otherwise as completely different as any princess could be
from the rustics with whom he was in daily contact, his face expressed
the blankest astonishment. Then--for he knew enough of the gossip of his
community--his straight, thick eyebrows came together inimically. This
was no doubt the woman of whom he had heard his parishioners talk with
bated breath as having given herself and her property up to a Jacobin, a
Toulon sans-culotte who had either delivered her parents to execution or
had murdered them himself during the first three days of massacres. No
one was very sure which it was, but the rest was current knowledge. The
abbé, though persuaded that any amount of moral turpitude was possible
in a godless country, had not accepted all that tale literally. No doubt
those people were Republican and impious, and the state of affairs up
there was scandalous and horrible. He struggled with his feelings of
repulsion and managed to smooth his brow and waited. He could not
imagine what that woman with mature form and a youthful face could want
at the presbytery. Suddenly it occurred to him that perhaps she wanted
to thank him--it was a very old occurrence--for interposing between the
fury of the villagers and that man. He couldn’t call him, even in his
thoughts, her husband, for apart from all other circumstances, that
connection could not imply any kind of marriage to a priest, had even
there been a legal form observed. His visitor was apparently
disconcerted by the expression of his face, the austere aloofness of his
attitude, and only a low murmur escaped her lips. He bent his head and
was not very certain what he had heard.

“You come to seek my aid?” he asked in a doubting tone.

She nodded slightly, and the abbé went to the door she had left half
open and looked out. There was not a soul in sight between the
presbytery and the village, or between the presbytery and the church. He
went back to face her, saying:

“We are as alone as we can well be. The old woman in the kitchen is as
deaf as a post.”

Now that he had been looking at Arlette closer the abbé felt a sort of
dread. The carmine of those lips, the pellucid, unstained, unfathomable
blackness of those eyes, the pallor of her cheeks, suggested to him
something provokingly pagan, something distastefully different from the
common sinners of this earth. And now she was ready to speak. He
arrested her with a raised hand.

“Wait,” he said. “I have never seen you before. I don’t even know
properly who you are. None of you belong to my flock--for you are from
Escampobar, are you not?” Sombre under their bony arches, his eyes
fastened on her face, noticed the delicacy of features, the naïve
pertinacity of her stare. She said:

“I am the daughter.”

“The daughter!... Oh! I see.... Much evil is spoken of you.”

She said a little impatiently: “By that rabble?” and the priest remained
mute for a moment. “What do they say? In my father’s time they wouldn’t
have dared to say anything. The only thing I saw of them for years and
years was when they were yelping like curs on the heels of Scevola.”

The absence of scorn in her tone was perfectly annihilating. Gentle
sounds flowed from her lips and a disturbing charm from her strange
equanimity. The abbé frowned heavily at these fascinations, which seemed
to have in them something diabolic.

“They are simple souls, neglected, fallen back into darkness. It isn’t
their fault. But they have natural feelings of humanity which were
outraged. I saved him from their indignation. There are things that must
be left to divine justice.”

He was exasperated by the unconsciousness of that fair face.

“That man whose name you have just pronounced and which I have heard
coupled with the epithet of blood-drinker is regarded as the master of
Escampobar Farm. He has been living there for years. How is that?”

“Yes, it is a long time ago since he brought me back to the house. Years
ago. Catherine let him stay.”

“Who is Catherine?” the abbé asked harshly.

“She is my father’s sister who was left at home to wait. She had given
up all hope of seeing any of us again, when one morning Scevola came
with me to the door. Then she let him stay. He is a poor creature. What
else could Catherine have done? And what is it to us up there how the
people in the village regard him?” She dropped her eyes and seemed to
fall into deep thought, then added, “It was only later that I discovered
that he was a poor creature, even quite lately. They call him
blood-drinker, do they? What of that? All the time he was afraid of his
own shadow.”

She ceased but did not raise her eyes.

“You are no longer a child,” began the abbé in a severe voice, frowning
at her downcast eyes, and he heard a murmur: “Not very long.” He
disregarded it and continued: “I ask you, is this all that you have to
tell me about that man? I hope that at least you are no hypocrite.”

“Monsieur l’Abbé,” she said, raising her eyes fearlessly, “what more am
I to tell you about him? I can tell you things that will make your hair
stand on end, but it wouldn’t be about him.”

For all answer the abbé made a weary gesture and turned away to walk up
and down the room. His face expressed neither curiosity nor pity, but a
sort of repugnance which he made an effort to overcome. He dropped into
a deep and shabby old arm-chair, the only object of luxury in the room,
and pointed to a wooden straight-backed stool. Arlette sat down on it
and began to speak. The abbé listened, but looking far away; his big
bony hands rested on the arms of the chair. After the first words he
interrupted her: “This is your own story you are telling me?”

“Yes,” said Arlette.

“Is it necessary that I should know?”

“Yes, Monsieur l’Abbé.”

“But why?”

He bent his head a little, without, however, ceasing to look far away.
Her voice now was very low. Suddenly the abbé threw himself back.

“You want to tell me your story because you have fallen in love with a
man?”

“No, because that has brought me back to myself. Nothing else could have
done it.”

He turned his head to look at her grimly, but he said nothing and looked
away again. He listened. At the beginning he muttered once or twice,
“Yes, I have heard that,” and then kept silent, not looking at her at
all. Once he interrupted her by a question: “You were confirmed before
the convent was forcibly entered and the nuns dispersed?”

“Yes,” she said, “a year before that or more.”

“And then two of those ladies took you with them towards Toulon.”

“Yes, the other girls had their relations near by. They took me with
them thinking to communicate with my parents, but it was difficult. Then
the English came and my parents sailed over to try and get some news of
me. It was safe for my father to be in Toulon then. Perhaps you think
that he was a traitor to his country?” she asked, and waited with parted
lips. With an impassible face the abbé murmured: “He was a good
royalist,” in a tone of bitter fatalism, which seemed to absolve that
man and all the other men of whose actions and errors he had ever heard.

For a long time, Arlette continued, her father could not discover the
house where the nuns had taken refuge. He only obtained some information
on the very day before the English evacuated Toulon. Late in the day he
appeared before her and took her away. The town was full of retreating
foreign troops. Her father left her with her mother and went out again
to make preparations for sailing home that very night; but the tartane
was no longer in the place where he had left her lying. The two Madrague
men that he had for a crew had disappeared also. Thus the family was
trapped in that town full of tumult and confusion. Ships and houses were
bursting into flames. Appalling explosions of gunpowder shook the earth.
She spent that night on her knees with her face hidden in her mother’s
lap, while her father kept watch by the barricaded door with a pistol in
each hand.

In the morning the house was filled with savage yells. People were heard
rushing up the stairs, and the door was burst in. She jumped up at the
crash and flung herself down on her knees in a corner with her face to
the wall. There was a murderous uproar, she heard two shots fired, then
somebody seized her by the arm and pulled her up to her feet. It was
Scevola. He dragged her to the door. The bodies of her father and mother
were lying across the doorway. The room was full of gunpowder smoke. She
wanted to fling herself on the bodies and cling to them, but Scevola
took her under the arms and lifted her over them. He seized her hand and
made her run with him, or rather dragged her downstairs. Outside on the
pavement some dreadful men and many fierce women with knives joined
them. They ran along the streets brandishing pikes and sabres, pursuing
other groups of unarmed people, who fled round corners with loud
shrieks.

“I ran in the midst of them, Monsieur l’Abbé,” Arlette went on in a
breathless murmur. “Whenever I saw any water I wanted to throw myself
into it, but I was surrounded on all sides, I was jostled and pushed and
most of the time Scevola held my hand very tight. When they stopped at a
wine shop they would offer me some wine. My tongue stuck to the roof of
my mouth and I drank. The wine, the pavements, the arms and faces,
everything was red. I had red splashes all over me. I had to run with
them all day, and all the time I felt as if I were falling down, and
down, and down. The houses were nodding at me. The sun would go out at
times. And suddenly I heard myself yelling exactly like the others. Do
you understand, Monsieur l’Abbé? The very same words!”

The eyes of the priest in their deep orbits glided towards her and then
resumed their far-away fixity. Between his fatalism and his faith he was
not very far from the belief of Satan taking possession of rebellious
mankind, exposing the nakedness of hearts like flint and of the
homicidal souls of the Revolution.

“I have heard something of that,” he whispered stealthily.

She affirmed with quiet earnestness: “Yet at that time I resisted with
all my might.”

That night Scevola put her under the care of a woman called Perose. She
was young and pretty, and was a native of Arles, her mother’s country.
She kept an inn. That woman locked her up in her own room, which was
next to the room where the patriots kept on shouting, singing and making
speeches far into the night. Several times the woman would look in for a
moment, make a hopeless gesture at her with both arms, and vanish again.
Later, on many other nights, when all the band lay asleep on benches
and on the floor, Perose would steal into the room, fall on her knees by
the bed on which Arlette sat upright, open-eyed and raving silently to
herself, embrace her feet and cry herself to sleep. But in the morning
she would jump up briskly and say: “Come. The great affair is to keep
our life in our bodies. Come along to help in the work of justice”; and
they would join the band that was making ready for another day of
traitor-hunting. But after a time the victims, of which the streets were
full at first, had to be sought for in back yards, ferreted out of their
hiding-places, dragged up out of the cellars or down from the garrets of
the houses, which would be entered by the band with howls of death and
vengeance.

“Then, Monsieur l’Abbé,” said Arlette, “I let myself go at last. I could
resist no longer. I said to myself: ‘If it is so then it must be right.’
But most of the time I was like a person half asleep and dreaming things
that it is impossible to believe. About that time, I don’t know why, the
woman Perose hinted to me that Scevola was a poor creature. Next night,
while all the band lay fast asleep in the big room, Perose and Scevola
helped me out of the window into the street and led me to the quay
behind the arsenal. Scevola had found our tartane lying at the pontoon
and one of the Madrague men with her. The other had disappeared. Perose
fell on my neck and cried a little. She gave me a kiss and said: ‘My
time will come soon. You, Scevola, don’t you show yourself in Toulon,
because nobody believes in you any more. Adieu, Arlette. Vive la
Nation!’ and she vanished in the night. I waited on the pontoon
shivering in my torn clothes, listening to Scevola and the man throwing
dead bodies overboard out of the tartane. Splash, splash, splash. And
suddenly I felt I must run away, but they were after me in a moment,
dragged me back and threw me down into that cabin which smelt of blood.
But when I got back to the farm all feeling had left me. I did not feel
myself exist. I saw things round me here and there, but I couldn’t look
at anything for long. Something was gone out of me. I know now that it
was not my heart, but then I didn’t mind what it was. I felt light and
empty, and a little cold all the time, but I could smile at people.
Nothing could matter. Nothing could mean anything. I cared for no one. I
wanted nothing. I wasn’t alive at all, Monsieur l’Abbé. People seemed to
see me and would talk to me, and it seemed funny--till one day I felt my
heart beat.”

“Why precisely did you come to me with this tale?” asked the abbé in a
low voice.

“Because you are a priest. Have you forgotten that I have been brought
up in a convent? I have not forgotten how to pray. But I am afraid of
the world now. What must I do?”

“Repent!” thundered the abbé, getting up. He saw her candid gaze
uplifted, and lowered his voice forcibly. “You must look with fearless
sincerity into the darkness of your soul. Remember whence the only true
help can come. Those whom God has visited by a trial such as yours
cannot be held guiltless of their enormities. Withdraw from the world.
Descend within yourself and abandon the vain thoughts of what people
call happiness. Be an example to yourself of the sinfulness of our
nature and of the weakness of our humanity. You may have been
possessed. What do I know? Perhaps it was permitted in order to lead
your soul to saintliness through a life of seclusion and prayer. To that
it would be my duty to help you. Meantime you must pray to be given
strength for a complete renunciation.”

Arlette, lowering her eyes slowly, appealed to the abbé as a symbolic
figure of spiritual mystery. “What can be God’s designs on this
creature?” he asked himself.

“Monsieur le Curé,” she said quietly, “I felt the need to pray to-day
for the first time in many years. When I left home it was only to go to
your church.”

“The church stands open to the worst of sinners,” said the abbé.

“I know. But I would have had to pass before all those villagers: and
you, Abbé, know well what they are capable of.”

“Perhaps,” murmured the abbé, “it would be better not to put their
charity to the test.”

“I must pray before I go back again. I thought you would let me come in
through the sacristy.”

“It would be inhuman to refuse your request,” he said, rousing himself
and taking down a key that hung on the wall. He put on his broad-brimmed
hat and without a word led the way through the wicket-gate and along the
path which he always used himself and which was out of sight of the
village fountain. After they had entered the damp and dilapidated
sacristy he locked the door behind them and only then opened another, a
smaller one, leading into the church. When he stood aside, Arlette
became aware of the chilly odour as of freshly turned-up earth mingled
with a faint scent of incense. In the deep dusk of the nave a single
little flame glimmered before an image of the Virgin. The abbé
whispered as she passed on:

“There before the great altar abase yourself and pray for grace and
strength and mercy in this world full of crimes against God and men.”

She did not look at him. Through the thin soles of her shoes she could
feel the chill of the flagstones. The abbé left the door ajar, sat down
on a rush-bottomed chair, the only one in the sacristy, folded his arms
and let his chin fall on his breast. He seemed to be sleeping
profoundly, but at the end of half an hour he got up and, going to the
doorway, stood looking at the kneeling figure sunk low on the altar
steps. Arlette’s face was buried in her hands in a passion of piety and
prayer. The abbé waited patiently for a good many minutes more, before
he raised his voice in a grave murmur which filled the whole dark place.

“It is time for you to leave. I am going to ring for vespers.”

The view of her complete absorption before the Most High had touched
him. He stepped back into the sacristy and after a time heard the
faintest possible swish of the black silk skirt of the Escampobar
daughter in her Arlesian costume. She entered the sacristy lightly with
shining eyes, and the abbé looked at her with some emotion.

“You have prayed well, my daughter,” he said. “No forgiveness will be
refused to you, for you have suffered much. Put your trust in the grace
of God.”

She raised her head and stayed her footsteps for a moment. In the dark
little place he could see the gleam of her eyes swimming in tears.

“Yes, Monsieur l’Abbé,” she said in her clear seductive voice. “I have
prayed and I feel answered. I entreated the merciful God to keep the
heart of the man I love always true to me or else to let me die before I
set my eyes on him again.”

The abbé paled under his tan of a village priest and leaned his
shoulders against the wall without a word.




XI


After leaving the church by the sacristy door Arlette never looked back.
The abbé saw her flit past the presbytery, and the building hid her from
his sight. He did not accuse her of duplicity. He had deceived himself.
A heathen. White as her skin was, the blackness of her hair and of her
eyes, the dusky red of her lips, suggested a strain of Saracen blood. He
gave her up without a sigh.

Arlette walked rapidly towards Escampobar as if she could not get there
soon enough; but as she neared the first enclosed field her steps became
slower and after hesitating awhile she sat down between two olive trees,
near a wall bordered by a growth of thin grass at the foot. “And if I
have been possessed,” she argued to herself, “as the abbé said, what is
it to me as I am now? That evil spirit cast my true self out of my body
and then cast away the body too. For years I have been living empty.
There has been no meaning in anything.”

But now her true self had returned matured in its mysterious exile,
hopeful and eager for love. She was certain that it had never been far
away from that outcast body which Catherine had told her lately was fit
for no man’s arms. That was all that old woman knew about it, thought
Arlette, not in scorn but rather in pity. She knew better, she had gone
to heaven for truth in that long prostration with its ardent prayers
and its moment of ecstasy, before an unlighted altar.

She knew its meaning well, and also the meaning of another--of a
terrestrial revelation which had come to her that day at noon while she
waited on the lieutenant. Everybody else was in the kitchen; she and
Réal were as much alone together as had ever happened to them in their
lives. That day she could not deny herself the delight to be near him,
to watch him covertly, to hear him perhaps utter a few words, to
experience that strange satisfying consciousness of her own existence
which nothing but Réal’s presence could give her; a sort of
unimpassioned but all-absorbing bliss, warmth, courage, confidence!...
She backed away from Réal’s table, seated herself facing him and cast
down her eyes. There was a great stillness in the salle except for the
murmur of the voices in the kitchen. She had at first stolen a glance or
two, and then peeping again through her eyelashes, as it were, she saw
his eyes rest on her with a peculiar meaning. This had never happened
before. She jumped up, thinking that he wanted something, and while she
stood in front of him with her hand resting on the table he stooped
suddenly, pressed it to the table with his lips and began kissing it
passionately without a sound, endlessly.... More startled than surprised
at first, then infinitely happy, she was beginning to breathe quickly,
when he left off and threw himself back in the chair. She walked away
from the table and sat down again to gaze at him openly, steadily,
without a smile. But he was not looking at her. His passionate lips were
set hard now and his face had an expression of stern despair. No word
passed between them. Brusquely he got up with averted eyes and went
outside, leaving the food before him unfinished.

In the usual course of things, on any other day, she would have got up
and followed him, for she had always yielded to the fascination that had
first roused her faculties. She would have gone out just to pass in
front of him once or twice. But this time she had not obeyed what was
stronger than fascination, something within herself, which at the same
time prompted and restrained her. She only raised her arm and looked at
her hand. It was true. It had happened. He had kissed it. Formerly she
cared not how gloomy he was as long as he remained somewhere where she
could look at him--which she would do at every opportunity with an open
and unbridled innocence. But now she knew better than to do that. She
had got up, had passed through the kitchen, meeting without
embarrassment Catherine’s inquisitive glance, and had gone upstairs.
When she came down after a time, he was nowhere to be seen, and
everybody else too seemed to have gone into hiding; Michel, Peyrol,
Scevola.... But if she had met Scevola she would not have spoken to him.
It was now a very long time since she had volunteered a conversation
with Scevola. She guessed, however, that Scevola had simply gone to lie
down in his lair, a narrow shabby room lighted by one glazed little
window high up in the end wall. Catherine had put him in there on the
very day he had brought her niece home, and he had retained it for his
own ever since. She could even picture him to herself in there stretched
on his pallet. She was capable of that now. Formerly, for years after
her return, people that were out of her sight were out of her mind
also. Had they run away and left her she would not have thought of them
at all. She would have wandered in and out of the empty house and round
the empty fields without giving anybody a thought. Peyrol was the first
human being she had noticed for years. Peyrol, since he had come, had
always existed for her. And as a matter of fact the rover was generally
very much in evidence about the farm. That afternoon, however, even
Peyrol was not to be seen. Her uneasiness began to grow, but she felt a
strange reluctance to go into the kitchen, where she knew her aunt would
be sitting in the arm-chair like a presiding genius of the house taking
its rest, and unreadable in her immobility. And yet she felt she must
talk about Réal to somebody. This was how the idea of going down to the
church had come to her. She would talk of him to the priest and to God.
The force of old associations asserted itself. She had been taught to
believe that one could tell everything to a priest, and that the
omnipotent God who knew everything could be prayed to, asked for grace,
for strength, for mercy, for protection, for pity. She had done it and
felt she had been heard.

       *       *       *       *       *

Her heart had quietened down while she rested under the wall. Pulling
out a long stalk of grass, she twined it round her fingers absently. The
veil of cloud had thickened over her head, early dusk had descended upon
the earth, and she had not found out what had become of Réal. She jumped
to her feet wildly. But directly she had done that she felt the need of
self-control. It was with her usual light step that she approached the
front of the house and for the first time in her life perceived how
barren and sombre it looked when Réal was not about. She slipped in
quietly through the door of the main building and ran upstairs. It was
dark on the landing. She passed by the door leading into the room
occupied by her aunt and herself. It had been her father and mother’s
bedroom. The other big room was the lieutenant’s during his visits to
Escampobar. Without even a rustle of her dress, like a shadow, she
glided along the passage, turned the handle without noise and went in.
After shutting the door behind her she listened. There was no sound in
the house. Scevola was either already down in the yard or still lying
open-eyed on his tumbled pallet in raging sulks about something. She had
once accidentally caught him at it, down on his face, one eye and cheek
of which were buried in the pillow, the other eye glaring savagely, and
had been scared away by a thick mutter: “Keep off. Don’t approach me.”
And all this had meant nothing to her then.

Having ascertained that the inside of the house was as still as the
grave, Arlette walked across to the window, which, when the lieutenant
was occupying the room, stood always open and with the shutter pushed
right back against the wall. It was, of course, uncurtained, and as she
came near to it Arlette caught sight of Peyrol coming down the hill on
his return from the lookout. His white head gleamed like silver against
the slope of the ground and by and by passed out of her sight, while her
ear caught the sound of his footsteps below the window. They passed into
the house, but she did not hear him come upstairs. He had gone into the
kitchen. To Catherine. They would talk about her and Eugène. But what
would they say? She was so new to life that everything appeared
dangerous: talk, attitudes, glances. She felt frightened at the mere
idea of silence between those two. It was possible. Suppose they didn’t
say anything to each other. That would be awful.

Yet she remained calm like a sensible person, who knows that rushing
about in excitement is not the way to meet unknown dangers. She swept
her eyes over the room and saw the lieutenant’s valise in a corner. That
was really what she had wanted to see. He wasn’t gone then. But it
didn’t tell her, though she opened it, what had become of him. As to his
return, she had no doubt whatever about that. He had always returned.
She noticed particularly a large packet sewn up in sail-cloth and with
three large red seals on the seam. It didn’t, however, arrest her
thoughts. Those were still hovering about Catherine and Peyrol
downstairs. How changed they were. Had they ever thought that she was
mad? She became indignant. “How could I have prevented that?” she asked
herself with despair. She sat down on the edge of the bed in her usual
attitude, her feet crossed, her hands lying in her lap. She felt on one
of them the impress of Réal’s lips, soothing, reassuring like every
certitude, but she was aware of a still remaining confusion in her mind,
an indefinite weariness like the strain of an imperfect vision trying to
discern shifting outlines, floating shapes, incomprehensible signs. She
could not resist the temptation of resting her tired body, just for a
little while.

She lay down on the very edge of the bed, the kissed hand tucked under
her cheek. The faculty of thinking abandoned her altogether, but she
remained open-eyed, wide awake. In that position, without hearing the
slightest sound, she saw the door handle move down as far as it would
go, perfectly noiseless, as though the lock had been oiled not long
before. Her impulse was to leap right out into the middle of the room,
but she restrained herself and only swung herself into a sitting
posture. The bed had not creaked. She lowered her feet gently to the
ground, and by the time when holding her breath she put her ear against
the door, the handle had come back into position. She had detected no
sound outside. Not the faintest. Nothing. It never occurred to her to
doubt her own eyes, but the whole thing had been so noiseless that it
could not have disturbed the lightest sleeper. She was sure that had she
been lying on her other side, that is with her back to the door, she
would have known nothing. It was some time before she walked away from
the door and sat on a chair which stood near a heavy and much-carved
table, an heirloom more appropriate to a château than to a farmhouse.
The dust of many months covered its smooth oval surface of dark, finely
grained wood.

“It must have been Scevola,” thought Arlette. It could have been no one
else. What could he have wanted? She gave herself up to thought, but
really she did not care. The absent Réal occupied all her mind. With an
unconscious slowness her finger traced in the dust on the table the
initials E. A. and achieved a circle round them. Then she jumped up,
unlocked the door and went downstairs. In the kitchen, as she fully
expected, she found Scevola with the others. Directly she appeared he
got up and ran upstairs, but returned almost immediately, looking as if
he had seen a ghost, and when Peyrol asked him some insignificant
question his lips and even his chin trembled before he could command
his voice. He avoided looking anybody in the face. The others too seemed
shy of meeting each other’s eyes, and the evening meal of the Escampobar
seemed haunted by the absent lieutenant. Peyrol, besides, had his
prisoner to think of. His existence presented a most interesting
problem, and the proceedings of the English ship was another, closely
connected with it and full of dangerous possibilities, Catherine’s black
and ungleaming eyes seemed to have sunk deeper in their sockets, but her
face wore its habitual severe aloofness of expression. Suddenly Scevola
spoke as if in answer to some thought of his own.

“What has lost us was moderation.”

Peyrol swallowed the piece of bread and butter which he had been
masticating slowly, and asked:

“What are you alluding to, citoyen?”

“I am alluding to the Republic,” answered Scevola in a more assured tone
than usual. “Moderation I say. We patriots held our hand too soon. All
the children of the ci-devants and all the children of traitors should
have been killed together with their fathers and mothers. Contempt for
civic virtues and love of tyranny were inborn in them all. They grow up
and trample on all the sacred principles.... The work of the Terror is
undone!”

“What do you propose to do about it?” growled Peyrol. “No use declaiming
here or anywhere for that matter. You wouldn’t find anybody to listen to
you--you cannibal,” he added in a good-humoured tone. Arlette, leaning
her head on her left hand, was tracing with the forefinger of her right
invisible initials on the tablecloth. Catherine, stooping to light a
four-beaked oil lamp mounted on a brass pedestal, turned her finely
carved face over her shoulder. The sans-culotte jumped up, flinging his
arms about. His hair was tousled from his sleepless tumbling on his
pallet. The unbuttoned sleeves of his shirt flapped against his thin
hairy forearms. He no longer looked as though he had seen a ghost. He
opened a wide black mouth, but Peyrol raised his finger at him calmly.

“No, no. The time when your own people up La Boyère way--don’t they live
up there?--trembled at the idea of you coming to visit them with a lot
of patriot scallywags at your back is past. You have nobody at your
back; and if you started spouting like this at large, people would rise
up and hunt you down like a mad dog.”

Scevola, who had shut his mouth, glanced over his shoulder, and as if
impressed by his unsupported state went out of the kitchen, reeling,
like a man who had been drinking. He had drunk nothing but water. Peyrol
looked thoughtfully at the door which the indignant sans-culotte had
slammed after him. During the colloquy between the two men, Arlette had
disappeared into the salle. Catherine, straightening her long back, put
the oil lamp with its four smoky flames on the table. It lighted her
face from below. Peyrol moved it slightly aside before he spoke.

“It was lucky for you,” he said, gazing upwards, “that Scevola hadn’t
even one other like himself when he came here.”

“Yes,” she admitted. “I had to face him alone, from first to last. But
can you see me between him and Arlette? In those days he raved terribly,
but he was dazed and tired out. Afterwards I recovered myself and I
could argue with him firmly. I used to say to him, ‘Look, she is so
young, and she has no knowledge of herself.’ Why, for months the only
thing she would say that one could understand was ‘Look how it spurts,
look how it splashes!’ He talked to me of his republican virtue. He was
not a profligate. He could wait. She was, he said, sacred to him, and
things like that. He would walk up and down for hours talking of her and
I would sit there listening to him with the key of the room the child
was locked in, in my pocket. I temporized, and, as you say yourself, it
was perhaps because he had no one at his back that he did not try to
kill me, which he might have done any day. I temporized. And after all,
why should he want to kill me? He told me more than once he was sure to
have Arlette for his own. Many a time he made me shiver explaining why
it must be so. She owed her life to him. Oh! that dreadful crazy life.
You know he is one of those men that can be patient as far as women are
concerned.”

Peyrol nodded understandingly. “Yes, some are like that. That kind is
more impatient sometimes to spill blood. Still I think that your life
was one long narrow escape, at least till I turned up here.”

“Things had settled down, somehow,” murmured Catherine. “But all the
same I was glad when you appeared here, a grey-headed man, serious.”

“Grey hairs will come to any sort of man,” observed Peyrol acidly, “and
you did not know me. You don’t know anything of me even now.”

“There have been Peyrols living less than half a day’s journey from
here,” observed Catherine in a reminiscent tone.

“That’s all right,” said the rover in such a peculiar tone that she
asked him sharply: “What’s the matter? Aren’t you one of them? Isn’t
Peyrol your name?”

“I have had many names and this was one of them. So this name and my
grey hair pleased you, Catherine? They gave you confidence in me, hein?”

“I wasn’t sorry to see you come. Scevola too, I believe. He heard that
patriots were being hunted down, here and there, and he was growing
quieter every day. You roused the child wonderfully.”

“And did that please Scevola too?”

“Before you came she never spoke to anybody unless first spoken to. She
didn’t seem to care where she was. At the same time,” added Catherine
after a pause, “she didn’t care what happened to her either. Oh, I have
had some heavy hours thinking it all over, in the daytime doing my work,
and at night while I lay awake, listening to her breathing. And I
growing older all the time, and, who knows, with my last hour ready to
strike. I often thought that when I felt it coming I would speak to you
as I am speaking to you now.”

“Oh, you did think,” said Peyrol in an undertone. “Because of my grey
hairs, I suppose.”

“Yes. And because you came from beyond the seas,” Catherine said with
unbending mien and in an unflinching voice. “Don’t you know that the
first time Arlette saw you she spoke to you and that it was the first
time I heard her speak of her own accord since she had been brought back
by that man, and I had to wash her from head to foot before I put her
into her mother’s bed?”

“The first time,” repeated Peyrol.

“It was like a miracle happening,” said Catherine, “and it was you that
had done it.”

“Then it must be that some Indian witch has given me the power,”
muttered Peyrol, so low that Catherine could not hear the words. But she
did not seem to care, and presently went on again:

“And the child took to you wonderfully. Some sentiment was aroused in
her at last.”

“Yes,” assented Peyrol grimly. “She did take to me. She learned to talk
to--the old man.”

“It’s something in you that seems to have opened her mind and unloosed
her tongue,” said Catherine, speaking with a sort of regal composure
down at Peyrol, like a chieftainess of a tribe. “I often used to look
from afar at you two talking and wonder what she....”

“She talked like a child,” struck in Peyrol abruptly. “And so you were
going to speak to me before your last hour came. Why, you are not making
ready to die yet?”

“Listen, Peyrol. If anybody’s last hour is near, it isn’t mine. You just
look about you a little. It was time I spoke to you.”

“Why, I am not going to kill anybody,” muttered Peyrol. “You are getting
strange ideas into your head.”

“It is as I said,” insisted Catherine without animation. “Death seems to
cling to her skirts. She has been running with it madly. Let us keep her
feet out of more human blood.”

Peyrol, who had let his head fall on his breast, jerked it up suddenly.
“What on earth are you talking about?” he cried angrily. “I don’t
understand you at all.”

“You have not seen the state she was in when I got her back into my
hands,” remarked Catherine.... “I suppose you know where the lieutenant
is. What made him go off like that? Where did he go to?”

“I know,” said Peyrol. “And he may be back to-night.”

“You know where he is! And of course you know why he has gone away and
why he is coming back,” pronounced Catherine in an ominous voice. “Well,
you had better tell him that unless he has a pair of eyes at the back of
his head he had better not return here--not return at all; for if he
does, nothing can save him from a treacherous blow.”

“No man was ever safe from treachery,” opined Peyrol after a moment’s
silence. “I won’t pretend not to understand what you mean.”

“You heard as well as I what Scevola said just before he went out. The
lieutenant is the child of some ci-devant and Arlette of a man they
called a traitor to his country. You can see yourself what was in his
mind.”

“He is a chicken-hearted spouter,” said Peyrol contemptuously, but it
did not affect Catherine’s attitude of an old sibyl risen from the
tripod to prophesy calmly atrocious disasters. “It’s all his
republicanism,” commented Peyrol with increased scorn. “He has got a fit
of it on.”

“No, that’s jealousy,” said Catherine. “Maybe he has ceased to care for
her in all these years. It is a long time since he has left off worrying
me. With a creature like that I thought that if I let him be master
here.... But no! I know that after the lieutenant started coming here
his awful fancies have come back. He is not sleeping at night. His
republicanism is always there. But don’t you know, Peyrol, that there
may be jealousy without love?”

“You think so,” said the rover profoundly. He pondered full of his own
experience. “And he has tasted blood too,” he muttered after a pause.
“You may be right.”

“I may be right,” repeated Catherine in a slightly indignant tone.
“Every time I see Arlette near him I tremble lest it should come to
words and to a bad blow. And when they are both out of my sight it is
still worse. At this moment I am wondering where they are. They may be
together and I daren’t raise my voice to call her away for fear of
rousing his fury.”

“But it’s the lieutenant he is after,” observed Peyrol in a lowered
voice. “Well, I can’t stop the lieutenant coming back.”

“Where is she? Where is he?” whispered Catherine in a tone betraying her
secret anguish.

Peyrol rose quietly and went into the salle, leaving the door open.
Catherine heard the latch of the outer door being lifted cautiously. In
a few moments Peyrol returned as quietly as he had gone out.

“I stepped out to look at the weather. The moon is about to rise and the
clouds have thinned down. One can see a star here and there.” He lowered
his voice considerably. “Arlette is sitting on the bench humming a
little song to herself. I really wonder whether she knew I was standing
within a few feet of her.”

“She doesn’t want to hear or see anybody except one man,” affirmed
Catherine, now in complete control of her voice. “And she was humming a
song, did you say? She who would sit for hours without making a sound.
And God knows what song it could have been!”

“Yes, there’s a great change in her,” admitted Peyrol with a heavy sigh.
“This lieutenant,” he continued after a pause, “has always behaved
coldly to her. I noticed him many times turn his face away when he saw
her coming towards us. You know what these epaulette-wearers are,
Catherine. And then this one has some worm of his own that is gnawing at
him. I doubt whether he has ever forgotten that he was a ci-devant boy.
Yet I do believe that she does not want to see and hear anybody but him.
Is it because she has been deranged in her head for so long?”

“No, Peyrol,” said the old woman. “It isn’t that. You want to know how I
can tell? For years nothing could make her either laugh or cry. You know
that yourself. You have seen her every day. Would you believe that
within the last month she has been both crying and laughing on my breast
without knowing why?”

“This I don’t understand,” said Peyrol.

“But I do. That lieutenant has got only to whistle to make her run after
him. Yes, Peyrol. That is so. She has no fear, no shame, no pride. I
myself have been nearly like that.” Her fine brown face seemed to grow
more impassive before she went on much lower and as if arguing with
herself: “Only I at least was never blood-mad. I was fit for any man’s
arms.... But then that man is not a priest.”

The last words made Peyrol start. He had almost forgotten that story. He
said to himself: “She knows, she has had the experience.”

“Look here, Catherine,” he said decisively, “the lieutenant is coming
back. He will be here probably about midnight. But one thing I can tell
you: he is not coming back to whistle her away. Oh no! It is not for her
sake that he will come back.”

“Well, if it isn’t for her that he is coming back then it must be
because death has beckoned to him,” she announced in a tone of solemn,
unemotional conviction. “A man who has received a sign from
death--nothing can stop him!”

Peyrol, who had seen death face to face many times, looked at
Catherine’s fine brown profile curiously.

“It is a fact,” he murmured, “that men who rush out to seek death do not
often find it. So one must have a sign? What sort of sign would it be?”

“How is anybody to know?” asked Catherine, staring across the kitchen at
the wall. “Even those to whom it is made do not recognize it for what it
is. But they obey all the same. I tell you, Peyrol, nothing can stop
them. It may be a glance, or a smile, or a shadow on the water, or a
thought that passes through the head. For my poor brother and
sister-in-law it was the face of their child.”

Peyrol folded his arms on his breast and dropped his head. Melancholy
was a sentiment to which he was a stranger; for what has melancholy to
do with the life of a sea-rover, a Brother of the Coast, a simple,
venturesome, precarious life, full of risks and leaving no time for
introspection or for that momentary self-forgetfulness which is called
gaiety. Sombre fury, fierce merriment, he had known in passing gusts,
coming from outside; but never this intimate inward sense of the vanity
of all things, that doubt of the power within himself.

“I wonder what the sign for me will be,” he thought: and concluded with
self-contempt that for him there would be no sign, that he would have to
die in his bed like an old yard dog in his kennel. Having reached that
depth of despondency, there was nothing more before him but a black gulf
into which his consciousness sank like a stone.

The silence which had lasted perhaps a minute after Catherine had
finished speaking was traversed suddenly by a clear high voice saying:

“What are you two plotting here?”

Arlette stood in the doorway of the salle. The gleam of light in the
whites of her eyes set off her black and penetrating glance. The
surprise was complete. The profile of Catherine, who was standing by the
table, became, if possible, harder; a sharp carving of an old prophetess
of some desert tribe. Arlette made three steps forward. In Peyrol even
extreme astonishment was deliberate. He had been famous for never
looking as though he had been caught unprepared. Age had accentuated
that trait of a born leader. He only slipped off the edge of the table
and said in his deep voice:

“Why, patronne! We haven’t said a word to each other for ever so long.”

Arlette moved nearer still. “I know,” she cried. “It was horrible. I
have been watching you two. Scevola came and dumped himself on the bench
close to me. He began to talk to me, and so I went away. That man bores
me. And here I find you people saying nothing. It’s insupportable. What
has come to you both? Say, you, Papa Peyrol--don’t you like me any
more?” Her voice filled the kitchen. Peyrol went to the salle door and
shut it. While coming back he was staggered by the brilliance of life
within her that seemed to pale the flames of the lamp. He said half in
jest:

“I don’t know whether I didn’t like you better when you were quieter.”

“And you would like best to see me still quieter in my grave.”

She dazzled him. Vitality streamed out of her eyes, her lips, her whole
person, enveloped her like a halo and ... yes, truly, the faintest
possible flush had appeared on her cheeks, played on them faintly rosy
like the light of a distant flame on the snow. She raised her arms up in
the air and let her hands fall from on high on Peyrol’s shoulders,
captured his desperately dodging eyes with her black and compelling
glance, put out all her instinctive seduction--while he felt a growing
fierceness in the grip of her fingers.

“No! I can’t hold it in! Monsieur Peyrol, Papa Peyrol, old gunner, you
horrid sea-wolf, be an angel and tell me where he is.”

The rover, whom only that morning the powerful grasp of Lieutenant Réal
found as unshakable as a rock, felt all his strength vanish under the
hands of that woman. He said thickly:

“He has gone to Toulon. He had to go.”

“What for? Speak the truth to me!”

“Truth is not for everybody to know,” mumbled Peyrol, with a sinking
sensation as though the very ground were going soft under his feet. “On
service,” he added in a growl.

Her hands slipped suddenly from his big shoulders. “On service?” she
repeated. “What service?” Her voice sank and the words “Oh, yes! His
service” were hardly heard by Peyrol, who as soon as her hands had left
his shoulders felt his strength returning to him and the yielding earth
grow firm again under his feet. Right in front of him Arlette, silent,
with her arms hanging down before her with entwined fingers, seemed
stunned because Lieutenant Réal was not free from all earthly
connections, like a visiting angel from heaven depending only on God to
whom she had prayed. She had to share him with some service that could
order him about. She felt in herself a strength, a power, greater than
any service.

“Peyrol,” she cried low, “don’t break my heart, my new heart, that has
just begun to beat. Feel how it beats. Who could bear it?” She seized
the rover’s thick hairy paw and pressed it hard against her breast.
“Tell me when he will be back.”

“Listen, patronne, you had better go upstairs,” began Peyrol with a
great effort and snatching his captured hand away. He staggered
backwards a little while Arlette shouted at him:

“You can’t order me about as you used to do.” In all the changes from
entreaty to anger she never struck a false note, so that her emotional
outburst had the heart-moving power of inspired art. She turned round
with a tempestuous swish to Catherine, who had neither stirred nor
emitted a sound: “Nothing you two can do will make any difference now.”
The next moment she was facing Peyrol again. “You frighten me with your
white hairs. Come!... am I to go on my knees to you?... There!”

The rover caught her under the elbows, swung her up clear of the ground,
and set her down on her feet, as if she had been a child. Directly he
had let her go she stamped her foot at him.

“Are you stupid?” she cried. “Don’t you understand that something has
happened to-day?”

Through all this scene Peyrol had kept his head as creditably as could
have been expected, in the manner of a seaman caught by a white squall
in the tropics. But at those words a dozen thoughts tried to rush
together through his mind, in chase of that startling declaration.
Something had happened! Where? How? Whom to? What thing? It couldn’t be
anything between her and the lieutenant. He had, it seemed to him, never
lost sight of the lieutenant from the first hour when they met in the
morning till he had sent him off to Toulon by an actual push on the
shoulder; except while he was having his dinner in the next room with
the door open and for the few minutes spent in talking with Michel in
the yard. But that was only a very few minutes, and directly afterwards
the first sight of the lieutenant sitting gloomily on the bench like a
lonely crow did not suggest either elation or excitement or any emotion
connected with a woman. In the face of these difficulties Peyrol’s mind
became suddenly a blank.

“Voyons, patronne,” he began, unable to think of anything else to say.
“What’s all this fuss about? I expect him to be back here about
midnight.”

He was extremely relieved to notice that she believed him. It was the
truth. For indeed he did not know what he could have invented on the
spur of the moment that would get her out of the way and induce her to
go to bed. She treated him to a sinister frown and a terribly menacing
“If you have lied.... Oh!”

He produced an indulgent smile. “Compose yourself. He will be here soon
after midnight. You may go to sleep with an easy mind.”

She turned her back on him contemptuously, and said curtly, “Come along,
aunt,” and went to the door leading to the passage. There she turned for
a moment with her hand on the door handle.

“You are changed. I can’t trust either of you. You are not the same
people.”

She went out. Only then did Catherine detach her gaze from the wall to
meet Peyrol’s eyes. “Did you hear what she said? We! Changed! It is she
herself....”

Peyrol nodded twice, and there was a long pause during which even the
flames of the lamp did not stir.

“Go after her, Mademoiselle Catherine,” he said at last with a shade of
sympathy in his tone. She did not move. “Allons--du courage,” he urged
her deferentially as it were. “Try to put her to sleep.”




XII


Upright and deliberate, Catherine left the kitchen, and in the passage
outside found Arlette waiting for her with a lighted candle in her hand.
Her heart was filled with sudden desolation by the beauty of that young
face enhaloed in the patch of light, with the profound darkness as of a
dungeon for a background. At once her niece led the way upstairs
muttering savagely through her pretty teeth: “He thinks I could go to
sleep. Old imbecile!”

Peyrol did not take his eyes off Catherine’s straight back till the door
had closed after her. Only then he relieved himself by letting the air
escape through his pursed lips and rolling his eyes freely about. He
picked up the lamp by the ring on the top of the central rod and went
into the salle, closing behind him the door of the dark kitchen. He
stood the lamp on the very table on which Lieutenant Réal had had his
midday meal. A small white cloth was still spread on it, and there was
his chair askew as he had pushed it back when he got up. Another of the
many chairs in the salle was turned round conspicuously to face the
table. These things made Peyrol remark to himself bitterly: “She sat and
stared at him as if he had been gilt all over, with three heads and
seven arms on his body”--a comparison reminiscent of certain idols he
had seen in an Indian temple. Though not an iconoclast, Peyrol felt
positively sick at the recollection, and hastened to step outside. The
great cloud had broken up and the mighty fragments were moving to the
westward in stately flight before the rising moon. Scevola, who had been
lying extended full length on the bench, swung himself up suddenly, very
upright.

“Had a little nap in the open?” asked Peyrol, letting his eyes roam
through the luminous space under the departing rearguard of the clouds
jostling each other up there.

“I did not sleep,” said the sans-culotte. “I haven’t closed my eyes--not
for one moment.”

“That must be because you weren’t sleepy,” suggested the deliberate
Peyrol, whose thoughts were far away with the English ship. His mental
eye contemplated her black image against the white beach of the Salins
describing a sparkling curve under the moon; and meantime he went on
slowly, “for it could not have been noise that kept you awake.” On the
level of Escampobar the shadows lay long on the ground while the side of
the lookout hill remained yet black but edged with an increasing
brightness. And the amenity of the stillness was such that it softened
for a moment Peyrol’s hard inward attitude towards all mankind,
including even the captain of the English ship. The old rover savoured a
moment of serenity in the midst of his cares.

“This is an accursed spot,” declared Scevola suddenly.

Peyrol, without turning his head, looked at him sideways. Though he had
sprung up from his reclining posture smartly enough, the citizen had
gone slack all over and was sitting all in a heap. His shoulders were
hunched up, his hands reposed on his knees. With his staring eyes he
resembled a sick child in the moonlight.

“It’s the very spot for hatching treacheries. One feels steeped in them
up to the neck.”

He shuddered and yawned a long irresistible nervous yawn with the gleam
of unexpected long canines in a retracted, gaping mouth giving away the
restless panther lurking in the man.

“Oh yes, there’s treachery about right enough. You couldn’t conceive
that, citoyen?”

“Of course I couldn’t,” assented Peyrol with serene contempt. “What is
this treachery that you are concocting?” he added carelessly, in a
social way, while enjoying the charm of a moonlit evening. Scevola, who
did not expect that turn, managed, however, to produce a rattling sort
of laugh almost at once.

“That’s a good one, ha! ha! ha!... Me!... concocting!... Why me?”

“Well,” said Peyrol carelessly, “there are not many of us to carry out
treacheries about here. The women are gone upstairs; Michel is down at
the tartane. There’s me, and you would not dare suspect me of treachery.
Well, there remains only you.”

Scevola roused himself. “This is not much of a jest,” he said. “I have
been a treason-hunter. I....”

He checked that strain. He was full of purely emotional suspicions.
Peyrol was talking like this only to annoy him and to get him out of the
way; but in the particular state of his feelings Scevola was acutely
aware of every syllable of these offensive remarks. “Aha,” he thought
to himself, “he doesn’t mention the lieutenant.” This omission seemed to
the patriot of immense importance. If Peyrol had not mentioned the
lieutenant it was because those two had been plotting some treachery
together, all the afternoon on board that tartane. That’s why nothing
had been seen of them for the best part of the day. As a matter of fact,
Scevola too had observed Peyrol returning to the farm in the evening,
only he had observed him from another window than Arlette. This was a
few minutes before his attempt to open the lieutenant’s door, in order
to find out whether Réal was in his room. He had tiptoed away,
uncertain, and going into the kitchen had found only Catherine and
Peyrol there. Directly Arlette joined them a sudden inspiration made him
run upstairs and try the door again. It was open now! A clear proof that
it was Arlette who had been locked up in there. The discovery that she
made herself at home like this in the lieutenant’s room gave Scevola
such a sickening shock that he thought he would die of it. It was beyond
doubt now that the lieutenant had been conspiring with Peyrol down on
board that tartane; for what else could they have been doing there. But
why had not Réal come up in the evening with Peyrol? Scevola asked
himself, sitting on the bench with his hands clasped between his
knees.... “It’s their cunning,” he concluded suddenly. “Conspirators
always avoid being seen together. Ha!”

It was as if somebody had let off a lot of fireworks in his brain. He
was illuminated, dazzled, confused, with a hissing in his ears and
showers of sparks before his eyes. When he raised his head he saw he
was alone. Peyrol had vanished. Scevola seemed to remember that he had
heard somebody pronounce the word “Good-night” and the door of the salle
slam. And sure enough the door of the salle was shut now. A dim light
shone in the window that was next to it. Peyrol had extinguished three
of the lamp flames, and was now reclining on one of the long tables with
that faculty of accommodating himself to a plank an old sea-dog never
loses. He had decided to remain below simply to be handy, and he didn’t
lie down on one of the benches along the wall because they were too
narrow. He left one wick burning, so that the lieutenant should know
where to look for him, and he was tired enough to think that he would
snatch a couple of hours’ sleep before Réal could return from Toulon. He
settled himself with one arm under his head as if he were on the deck of
a privateer, and it never occurred to him that Scevola was looking
through the panes; but they were so small and dusty that the patriot
could see nothing. His movement had been purely instinctive. He wasn’t
even aware that he had looked in. He went away from there, walked to the
end of the building, spun round and walked back again to the other end;
and it was as if he had been afraid of going beyond the wall against
which he reeled sometimes. Conspiracy, conspiracy, he thought. He was
now absolutely certain that the lieutenant was still hiding in that
tartane, and was only waiting till all was quiet to sneak back to his
room in which Scevola had proof positive that Arlette was in the habit
of making herself at home. To rob him of his right to Arlette was part
of the conspiracy, no doubt.

“Have I been a slave to those two women, have I waited all those years,
only to see that corrupt creature go off infamously with a ci-devant,
with a conspiring aristocrat?”

He became giddy with virtuous fury. There was enough evidence there for
any revolutionary tribunal to cut all their heads off. Tribunal! There
was no tribunal! No revolutionary justice! No patriots! He hit his
shoulder against the wall in his distress with such force that he
rebounded. This world was no place for patriots.

“If I had betrayed myself in the kitchen they would have murdered me in
there.”

As it was he thought that he had said too much. Too much. “Prudence!
Caution!” he repeated to himself, gesticulating with both arms. Suddenly
he stumbled, and there was an amazing metallic clatter made by something
that fell at his feet.

“They are trying to kill me now,” he thought, shaking with fright. He
gave himself up for dead. Profound silence reigned all round. Nothing
more happened. He stooped fearfully to look and recognized his own
stable fork lying on the ground. He remembered he had left it at noon
leaning against the wall. His own foot had made it fall. He threw
himself upon it greedily. “Here’s what I need,” he muttered feverishly.
“I suppose that by now the lieutenant would think I am gone to bed.”

He flattened himself upright against the wall with the fork held along
his body like a grounded musket. The moon clearing the hill-top flooded
suddenly the front of the house with its cold light, but he didn’t know
it; he imagined himself still to be ambushed in the shadow and remained
motionless, glaring at the path leading towards the cove. His teeth
chattered with savage impatience.

He was so plainly visible in his deathlike rigidity that Michel, coming
up out of the ravine, stopped dead short, believing him an apparition
not belonging to this earth. Scevola, on his side, noticed the moving
shadow cast by a man--that man!--and charged forward without reflection,
the prongs of the fork lowered like a bayonet. He didn’t shout. He came
straight on, growling like a dog, and lunged headlong with his weapon.

Michel, a primitive untroubled by anything so uncertain as intelligence,
executed an instantaneous sideways leap with the precision of a wild
animal; but he was enough of a man to become afterwards paralysed with
astonishment. The impetus of the rush carried Scevola several yards down
the hill, before he could turn round and assume an offensive attitude.
Then the two adversaries recognized each other. The terrorist exclaimed:
“Michel!” and Michel hastened to pick up a large stone from the ground.

“Hey, you, Scevola,” he cried, not very loud but very threatening. “What
are these tricks?... Keep away, or I will heave that piece of rock at
your head, and I am good at that.”

Scevola grounded the fork with a thud. “I didn’t recognize you,” he
said.

“That’s a story. Who did you think I was? Not the other! I haven’t got a
bandaged head, have I?”

Scevola began to scramble up. “What’s this?” he asked. “What head did
you say?”

“I say that if you come near I will knock you over with that stone,”
answered Michel. “You aren’t to be trusted when the moon is full. Not
recognize! There’s a silly excuse for flying at people like this. You
haven’t got anything against me, have you?”

“No,” said the ex-terrorist in a dubious tone and keeping a watchful eye
on Michel, who was still holding the stone in his hand.

“People have been saying for years that you are a kind of lunatic,”
Michel criticized fearlessly, because the other’s discomfiture was
evident enough to put heart into the timid hare. “If a fellow cannot
come up now to get a snooze in the shed without being run at with a
fork, well....”

“I was only going to put this fork away,” Scevola burst out volubly. “I
had left it leaning against the wall, and as I was passing along I
suddenly saw it, so I thought I would put it in the stable before I went
to bed. That’s all.”

Michel’s mouth fell open a bit.

“Now what do you think I would want with a stable fork at this time of
night, if it wasn’t to put it away?” argued Scevola.

“What indeed!” mumbled Michel, who began to doubt the evidence of his
senses.

“You go about mooning like a fool and imagine a lot of silly things, you
great stupid imbecile. All I wanted to do was to ask whether everything
was all right down there, and you, idiot, bound to one side like a goat
and pick up a stone. The moon has affected your head, not mine. Now drop
it.”

Michel, accustomed to do what he was told, opened his fingers slowly,
not quite convinced but thinking there might be something in it.
Scevola, perceiving his advantage, scolded on:

“You are dangerous. You ought to have your feet and hands tied every
full moon. What did you say about a head just now? What head?”

“I said that I didn’t have a broken head.”

“Was that all?” said Scevola. He was asking himself what on earth could
have happened down there during the afternoon to cause a broken head.
Clearly, it must have been either a fight or an accident, but in any
case he considered that it was for him a favourable circumstance, for
obviously a man with a bandaged head is at a disadvantage. He was
inclined to think it must have been some silly accident, and he
regretted profoundly that the lieutenant had not killed himself
outright. He turned sourly to Michel.

“Now you may go into the shed. And don’t try any of your tricks with me
any more, because next time you pick up a stone I will shoot you like a
dog.”

He began to move towards the yard gate which stood always open, throwing
over his shoulder an order to Michel: “Go into the salle. Somebody has
left a light in there. They all seem to have gone crazy to-day. Take the
lamp into the kitchen and put it out, and see that the door into the
yard is shut. I am going to bed.” He passed through the gateway, but he
did not penetrate into the yard very far. He stopped to watch Michel
obeying the order. Scevola, advancing his head cautiously beyond the
pillar of the gate, waited till he had seen Michel open the door of the
salle and then bounded out again across the level space, and down the
ravine path. It was a matter of less than a minute. His fork was still
on his shoulder. His only desire was not to be interfered with, and for
the rest he did not care what they all did, what they would think and
how they would behave. The fixed idea had taken complete possession of
him. He had no plan, but he had a principle on which to act; and that
was to get at the lieutenant unawares, and if the fellow died without
knowing what hand had struck him, so much the better. Scevola was going
to act in the cause of virtue and justice. It was not to be a matter of
personal contest at all. Meantime, Michel, having gone into the salle,
had discovered Peyrol fast asleep on a table. Though his reverence for
Peyrol was unbounded, his simplicity was such that he shook his master
by the shoulder as he would have done any common mortal. The rover
passed from a state of inertia into a sitting posture so quickly that
Michel stepped back a pace and waited to be addressed. But as Peyrol
only stared at him, Michel took the initiative in a concise phrase:

“He’s at it!”

Peyrol did not seem completely awake: “What is it you mean?” he asked.

“He is making motions to escape.”

Peyrol was wide awake now. He even swung his feet off the table.

“Is he? Haven’t you locked the cabin door?”

Michel, very frightened, explained that he had never been told to do
that.

“No?” remarked Peyrol placidly. “I must have forgotten.” But Michel
remained agitated, and murmured: “He is escaping.”

“That’s all right,” said Peyrol. “What are you fussing about? How far
can he escape, do you think?”

A slow grin appeared on Michel’s face. “If he tries to scramble over the
top of the rocks, he will get a broken neck in no time,” he said. “And
he certainly won’t get very far, that’s a fact.”

“Well--you see,” said Peyrol.

“And he doesn’t seem strong either. He crawled out of the cabin door and
got as far as the little water cask and he dipped and dipped into it. It
must be half empty by now. After that he got on to his legs. I cleared
out ashore directly I heard him move,” he went on in a tone of intense
self-approval. “I hid myself behind a rock and watched him.”

“Quite right,” observed Peyrol. After that word of commendation,
Michel’s face wore a constant grin.

“He sat on the after-deck,” he went on as if relating an immense joke,
“with his feet dangling down the hold, and may the devil take me if I
don’t think he had a nap with his back against the cask. He was nodding
and catching himself up, with that big white head of his. Well, I got
tired of watching that, and as you told me to keep out of his way, I
thought I would come up here and sleep in the shed. That was right,
wasn’t it?”

“Quite right,” repeated Peyrol. “Well, you go now into the shed. And so
you left him sitting on the after-deck?”

“Yes,” said Michel. “But he was rousing himself. I hadn’t got away more
than ten yards when I heard an awful thump on board. I think he tried to
get up and fell down the hold.”

“Fell down the hold?” repeated Peyrol sharply.

“Yes, notre maître. I thought at first I would go back and see, but you
had warned me against him, hadn’t you? And I really think that nothing
can kill him.”

Peyrol got down from the table with an air of concern which would have
astonished Michel, if he had not been utterly incapable of observing
things.

“This must be seen to,” murmured the rover, buttoning the waistband of
his trousers. “My cudgel there, in the corner. Now you go to the shed.
What the devil are you doing at the door? Don’t you know the way to the
shed?” This last observation was caused by Michel remaining in the
doorway of the salle with his head out and looking to right and left
along the front of the house. “What’s come to you? You don’t suppose he
has been able to follow you so quick as this up here?”

“Oh no, notre maître, quite impossible. I saw that sacré Scevola
promenading up and down here. I don’t want to meet him again.”

“Was he promenading outside,” asked Peyrol, with annoyance. “Well, what
do you think he can do to you? What notions have you got in your silly
head? You are getting worse and worse. Out you go.”

Peyrol extinguished the lamp and, going out, closed the door without the
slightest noise. The intelligence about Scevola being on the move did
not please him very much, but he reflected that probably the
sans-culotte had fallen asleep again, and after waking up was on his way
to bed when Michel caught sight of him. He had his own view of the
patriot’s psychology and did not think the women were in any danger.
Nevertheless he went to the shed and heard the rustling of straw as
Michel settled himself for the night.

“Debout,” he cried low. “Sh, don’t make any noise. I want you to go
into the house and sleep at the bottom of the stairs. If you hear
voices, go up, and if you see Scevola about, knock him down. You aren’t
afraid of him, are you?”

“No, if you tell me not to be,” said Michel, who, picking up his shoes,
a present from Peyrol, walked barefoot towards the house. The rover
watched him slipping noiselessly through the salle door. Having thus, so
to speak, guarded his base, Peyrol proceeded down the ravine with a very
deliberate caution. When he got as far as the little hollow in the
ground from which the mastheads of the tartane could be seen, he
squatted and waited. He didn’t know what his prisoner had done or was
doing, and he did not want to blunder into the way of his escape. The
day-old moon was high enough to have shortened the shadows almost to
nothing and all the rocks were inundated by a yellow sheen, while the
bushes by contrast looked very black. Peyrol reflected that he was not
very well concealed. The continued silence impressed him in the end. “He
has got away,” he thought. And yet he was not sure. Nobody could be
sure. He reckoned it was about an hour since Michel had left the
tartane; time enough for a man, even on all fours, to crawl down to the
shore of the cove. Peyrol wished he had not hit so hard. His object
could have been attained with half the force. On the other hand all the
proceedings of his prisoner, as reported by Michel, seemed quite
rational. Naturally the fellow was badly shaken. Peyrol felt as though
he wanted to go on board and give him some encouragement, and even
active assistance.

The report of a gun from seaward cut his breath short as he lay there
meditating. Within a minute there was a second report, sending another
wave of deep sound among the crags and hills of the peninsula. The
ensuing silence was so profound that it seemed to extend to the very
inside of Peyrol’s head, and lull all his thoughts for a moment. But he
had understood. He said to himself that after this his prisoner, if he
had life enough left in him to stir a limb, would rather die than not
try to make his way to the seashore. The ship was calling to her man.

In fact those two guns had proceeded from the _Amelia_. After passing
beyond Cape Esterel, Captain Vincent dropped an anchor underfoot off the
beach just as Peyrol had surmised he would do. From about six o’clock
till nine the _Amelia_ lay there with her unfurled sails hanging in the
gear. Just before the moon rose the captain came up on deck and after a
short conference with his first lieutenant, directed the master to get
the ship under way and put her head again for the Petite Passe. Then he
went below, and presently word was passed on deck that the captain
wanted Mr. Bolt. When the master’s mate appeared in his cabin, Captain
Vincent motioned him to a chair.

“I don’t think I ought to have listened to you,” he said. “Still, the
idea was fascinating, but how it would strike other people it is hard to
say. The losing of our man is the worst feature. I have an idea that we
might recover him. He may have been captured by the peasants or have met
with an accident. It’s unbearable to think of him lying at the foot of
some rock with a broken leg. I have ordered the first and second cutters
to be manned, and I propose that you should take command of them and
enter the cove and, if necessary, advance a little inland to
investigate. As far as we know there have never been any troops on that
peninsula. The first thing you will do is to examine the coast.”

He talked for some time, giving more minute instructions, and then went
on deck. The _Amelia_, with the two cutters towing alongside, reached
about half-way down the Passe and then the boats were ordered to
proceed. Just before they shoved off two guns were fired in quick
succession.

“Like this, Bolt,” explained Captain Vincent, “Symons will guess that we
are looking for him; and if he is hiding anywhere near the shore he will
be sure to come down where he can be seen by you.”




XIII


The motive force of a fixed idea is very great. In the case of Scevola
it was great enough to launch him down the slope and to rob him for the
moment of all caution. He bounded amongst the boulders, using the handle
of the stable fork for a staff. He paid no regard to the nature of the
ground, till he got a fall and found himself sprawling on his face,
while the stable fork went clattering down until it was stopped by a
bush. It was this circumstance which saved Peyrol’s prisoner from being
caught unawares. Since he had got out of the little cabin, simply
because after coming to himself he had perceived it was open, Symons had
been greatly refreshed by long drinks of cold water and by his little
nap in the fresh air. Every moment he was feeling in better command of
his limbs. As to the command of his thoughts, that was coming to him
too, rather quickly. The advantage of having a very thick skull became
evident in the fact that as soon as he had dragged himself out of that
cabin he knew where he was. The next thing he did was to look at the
moon, to judge of the passage of time. Then he gave way to an immense
surprise at the fact of being alone aboard the tartane. As he sat with
his legs dangling into the open hold he tried to guess how it came about
that the cabin had been left unlocked and unguarded.

He went on thinking about this unexpected situation. What could have
become of that white-headed villain? Was he dodging about somewhere
watching for a chance to give him another tap on the head? Symons felt
suddenly very unsafe sitting there on the after-deck in the full light
of the moon. Instinct rather than reason suggested to him that he ought
to get down into the dark hold. It seemed a great undertaking at first,
but once he started he accomplished it with the greatest ease, though he
could not avoid knocking down a small spar which was leaning up against
the deck. It preceded him into the hold with a loud crash which gave
poor Symons an attack of palpitation of the heart. He sat on the keelson
of the tartane and gasped, but after a while reflected that all this did
not matter. His head felt very big, his neck was very painful and one
shoulder was certainly very stiff. He could never stand up against that
old ruffian. But what had become of him? Why! He had gone to fetch the
soldiers! After that conclusion Symons became more composed. He began to
try to remember things. When he had last seen that old fellow it was
daylight, and now--Symons looked up at the moon again--it must be near
six bells in the first watch. No doubt the old scoundrel was sitting in
a wine shop drinking with the soldiers. They would be here soon enough!
The idea of being a prisoner of war made his heart sink a little. His
ship appeared to him invested with an extraordinary number of lovable
features which included Captain Vincent and the first lieutenant. He
would have been glad to shake hands even with the corporal, a surly and
malicious marine acting as master-at-arms of the ship. “I wonder where
she is now,” he thought dismally, feeling his distaste for captivity
grow with the increase of his strength.

It was at this moment that he heard the noise of Scevola’s fall. It was
pretty close; but afterwards he heard no voices and footsteps heralding
the approach of a body of men. If this was the old ruffian coming back,
then he was coming back alone. At once Symons started on all fours for
the fore end of the tartane. He had an idea that ensconced under the
foredeck he would be in a better position to parley with the enemy and
that perhaps he could find there a handspike or some piece of iron to
defend himself with. Just as he had settled himself in his hiding-place
Scevola stepped from the shore on to the after-deck.

At the very first glance Symons perceived that this one was very unlike
the man he expected to see. He felt rather disappointed. As Scevola
stood still in full moonlight Symons congratulated himself on having
taken up a position under the foredeck. That fellow, who had a beard,
was like a sparrow in body compared with the other; but he was armed
dangerously with something that looked to Symons either like a trident
or fishgrains on a staff. “A devil of a weapon that,” he thought,
appalled. And what on earth did that beggar want on board? What could he
be after?

The new-comer acted strangely at first. He stood stock still, craning
his neck here and there, peering along the whole length of the tartane,
then crossing the deck he repeated all those performances on the other
side. “He has noticed that the cabin door is open. He’s trying to see
where I’ve got to. He will be coming forward to look for me,” said
Symons to himself. “If he corners me here with that beastly pronged
affair I am done for.” For a moment he debated within himself whether it
wouldn’t be better to make a dash for it and scramble ashore; but in the
end he mistrusted his strength. “He would run me down for sure,” he
concluded. “And he means no good, that’s certain. No man would go about
at night with a confounded thing like that if he didn’t mean to do for
somebody.”

Scevola, after keeping perfectly still, straining his ears for any sound
from below where he supposed Lieutenant Réal to be, stooped down to the
cabin scuttle and called in a low voice: “Are you there, lieutenant?”
Symons saw these motions and could not imagine their purport. That
excellent able seaman of proved courage in many cutting-out expeditions
broke into a slight perspiration. In the light of the moon the prongs of
the fork, polished by much use, shone like silver, and the whole aspect
of the stranger was weird and dangerous in the extreme. Who could that
man be after, but him, himself.

Scevola, receiving no answer, remained in a stooping position. He could
not detect the slightest sound of breathing down there. He remained in
this position so long that Symons became quite interested. “He must
think I am still down there,” he whispered to himself. The next
proceeding was quite astonishing. The man, taking up a position on one
side of the cuddy scuttle and holding his horrid weapon as one would a
boarding pike, uttered a terrific whoop and went on yelling in French
with such volubility that he quite frightened Symons. Suddenly he left
off, moved away from the scuttle and looked at a loss what to do next.
Anybody who could have then seen Symons’ protruded head with his face
turned aft would have seen on it an expression of horror. “The cunning
beast,” he thought. “If I had been down there, with the row he made, I
would have surely rushed on deck and then he would have had me.” Symons
experienced the feeling of a very narrow escape; yet it brought not much
relief. It was simply a matter of time. The fellow’s homicidal purpose
was evident. He was bound before long to come forward. Symons saw him
move, and thought, “Now he’s coming,” and prepared himself for a dash.
“If I can dodge past these blamed prongs I might be able to take him by
the throat,” he reflected, without, however, feeling much confidence in
himself.

But to his great relief Scevola’s purpose was simply to conceal the fork
in the hold in such a manner that the handle of it just reached the edge
of the after-deck. In that position it was of course invisible to
anybody coming from the shore. Scevola had made up his mind that the
lieutenant was out of the tartane. He had wandered away along the shore
and would probably be back in a moment. Meantime it had occurred to him
to see if he could discover anything compromising in the cabin. He did
not take the fork down with him because in that confined space it would
have been useless and rather a source of embarrassment than otherwise
should the returning lieutenant find him there. He cast a circular
glance around the basin and then prepared to go down.

Every movement of his was watched by Symons. He guessed Scevola’s
purpose by his movements, and said to himself: “Here’s my only chance,
and not a second to be lost either.” Directly Scevola turned his back
on the forepart of the tartane in order to go down the little cabin
ladder, Symons crawled out from his concealment. He ran along the hold
on all fours for fear the other should turn his head round before
disappearing below, but directly he judged that the man had touched
bottom, he stood on his feet and catching hold of the main rigging swung
himself on the after-deck and, as it were in the same movement, flung
himself on the doors of the cabin, which came together with a crash. How
he could secure them he had not thought, but as a matter of fact he saw
the padlock hanging on a staple on one side; the key was in it, and it
was a matter of a fraction of a second to secure the doors effectually.

Almost simultaneously with the crash of the cabin door there was a
shrill exclamation of surprise down there, and just as Symons had turned
the key the man he had trapped made an effort to break out. That,
however, did not disturb Symons. He knew the strength of that door. His
first action was to get possession of the stable fork. At once he felt
himself a match for any single man, or even two men, unless they had
fire-arms. He had no hope, however, of being able to resist the soldiers
and really had no intention of doing so. He expected to see them appear
at any moment led by that confounded marinero. As to what the farmer man
had come for on board the tartane he had not the slightest doubt about
it. Not being troubled by too much imagination, it seemed to him obvious
that it was to kill an Englishman and for nothing else. “Well, I am
jiggered,” he exclaimed mentally. “The damned savage! I haven’t done
anything to him. They must be a murderous lot hereabouts.” He looked
anxiously up the slope. He would have welcomed the arrival of soldiers.
He wanted more than ever to be made a proper prisoner, but a profound
stillness reigned on the shore and a most absolute silence down below in
the cabin. Absolute. No word, no movement. The silence of the grave.
“He’s scared to death,” thought Symons, hitting in his simplicity on the
exact truth. “It would serve him jolly well right if I went down there
and ran him through with that thing. I would do it for a shilling, too.”
He was getting angry. It occurred to him also that there was some wine
down there too. He discovered he was very thirsty and he felt rather
faint. He sat down on the little skylight to think the matter over while
awaiting the soldiers. He even gave a friendly thought to Peyrol
himself. He was quite aware that he could have gone ashore and hidden
himself for a time, but that meant in the end being hunted among the
rocks and, certainly, captured; with the additional risk of getting a
musket ball through his body.

The first gun of the _Amelia_ lifted him to his feet as though he had
been snatched up by the hair of his head. He intended to give a
resounding cheer, but produced only a feeble gurgle in his throat. His
ship was talking to him. They hadn’t given him up. At the second report
he scrambled ashore with the agility of a cat--in fact, with so much
agility that he had a fit of giddiness. After it passed off he returned
deliberately to the tartane to get hold of the stable fork. Then,
trembling with emotion, he staggered off quietly and resolutely with the
only purpose of getting down to the seashore. He knew that as long as he
kept downhill he would be all right. The ground in this part being a
smooth rocky surface and Symons being barefooted, he passed at no great
distance from Peyrol without being heard. When he got on rough ground he
used the stable fork for a staff. Slowly as he moved, he was not really
strong enough to be sure-footed. Ten minutes later or so Peyrol, lying
ensconced behind a bush, heard the noise of a rolling stone far away in
the direction of the cove. Instantly the patient Peyrol got on his feet
and started towards the cove himself. Perhaps he would have smiled if
the importance and gravity of the affair in which he was engaged had not
given all his thoughts a serious cast. Pursuing a higher path than the
one followed by Symons, he had presently the satisfaction of seeing the
fugitive, made very noticeable by the white bandages about his head,
engaged in the last part of the steep descent. No nurse could have
watched with more anxiety the adventure of a little boy than Peyrol the
progress of his former prisoner. He was very glad to perceive that he
had had the sense to take what looked like the tartane’s boathook to
help himself with. As Symons’ figure sank lower and lower in his descent
Peyrol moved on, step by step, till at last he saw him from above
sitting down on the seashore, looking very forlorn and lonely, with his
bandaged head between his hands. Instantly Peyrol sat down too,
protected by a projecting rock. And it is safe to say that with that
there came a complete cessation of all sound and movement on the lonely
head of the peninsula for a full half-hour.

Peyrol was not in doubt as to what was going to happen. He was as
certain that the corvette’s boat or boats were now on the way to the
cove as though he had seen them leave the side of the _Amelia_. But he
began to get a little impatient. He wanted to see the end of this
episode. Most of the time he was watching Symons. “Sacré tête dure,” he
thought. “He has gone to sleep.” Indeed Symons’ immobility was so
complete that he might have been dead from his exertions: only Peyrol
had a conviction that his once youthful chum was not the sort of person
that dies easily. The part of the cove he had reached was all right for
Peyrol’s purpose. But it would have been quite easy for a boat or boats
to fail to notice Symons, and the consequence of that would be that the
English would probably land in several parties for a search, discover
the tartane.... Peyrol shuddered.

Suddenly he made out a boat just clear of the eastern point of the cove.
Mr. Bolt had been hugging the coast and progressing very slowly,
according to his instructions, till he had reached the edge of the
point’s shadow where it lay ragged and black on the moonlit water.
Peyrol could see the oars rise and fall. Then another boat glided into
view. Peyrol’s alarm for his tartane grew intolerable. “Wake up, animal,
wake up,” he mumbled through his teeth. Slowly they glided on, and the
first cutter was on the point of passing by the man on the shore when
Peyrol was relieved by the hail of “Boat ahoy!” reaching him faintly
where he knelt leaning forward, an absorbed spectator.

He saw the boat heading for Symons, who was standing up now and making
desperate signs with both arms. Then he saw him dragged in over the
bows, the boat back out, and then both of them tossed oars and floated
side by side on the sparkling water of the cove.

Peyrol got up from his knees. They had their man now. But perhaps they
would persist in landing, since there must have been some other purpose
at first in the mind of the captain of the English corvette. This
suspense did not last long. Peyrol saw the oars fall in the water, and
in a very few minutes the boats, pulling round, disappeared one after
another behind the eastern point of the cove.

“That’s done,” muttered Peyrol to himself. “I will never see the silly
Hard-head again.” He had a strange notion that those English boats had
carried off something belonging to him, not a man but a part of his own
life, the sensation of a regained touch with the far-off days in the
Indian Ocean. He walked down quickly as if to examine the spot from
which Testa Dura had left the soil of France. He was in a hurry now to
get back to the farmhouse and meet Lieutenant Réal, who would be due
back from Toulon. The way by the cove was as short as any other. When he
got down he surveyed the empty shore and wondered at a feeling of
emptiness within himself. While walking up towards the foot of the
ravine he saw an object lying on the ground. It was a stable fork. He
stood over it asking himself, “How on earth did this thing come here?”
as though he had been too surprised to pick it up. Even after he had
done so he remained motionless, meditating on it. He connected it with
some activity of Scevola, since he was the man to whom it belonged, but
that was no sort of explanation of its presence on that spot, unless ...

“Could he have drowned himself?” thought Peyrol, looking at the smooth
and luminous water of the cove. It could give him no answer. Then at
arm’s length he contemplated his find. At last he shook his head,
shouldered the fork, and with slow steps continued on his way.




XIV


The midnight meeting of Lieutenant Réal and Peyrol was perfectly silent.
Peyrol, sitting on the bench outside the salle, had heard the footsteps
coming up the Madrague track long before the lieutenant became visible.
But he did not move. He did not even look at him. The lieutenant,
unbuckling his sword-belt, sat down without uttering a word. The moon,
the only witness of the meeting, seemed to shine on two friends so
identical in thought and feeling that they could commune with each other
without words. It was Peyrol who spoke first.

“You are up to time.”

“I had the deuce of a job to hunt up the people and get the certificate
stamped. Everything was shut up. The Port-Admiral was giving a
dinner-party, but he came out to speak to me when I sent in my name. And
all the time, do you know, gunner, I was wondering whether I would ever
see you again in my life. Even after I had the certificate, such as it
is, in my pocket, I wondered whether I would.”

“What the devil did you think was going to happen to me?” growled
Peyrol, perfunctorily. He had thrown the incomprehensible stable fork
under the narrow bench, and with his feet drawn in he could feel it
there, lying against the wall.

“No, the question with me was whether I would ever come here again.”

Réal drew a folded paper from his pocket and dropped it on the bench.
Peyrol picked it up carelessly. That thing was meant only to throw dust
into Englishmen’s eyes. The lieutenant, after a moment’s silence, went
on with the sincerity of a man who suffered too much to keep his trouble
to himself.

“I had a hard struggle.”

“That was too late,” said Peyrol, very positively. “You had to come back
here for very shame; and now you have come, you don’t look very happy.”

“Never mind my looks, gunner. I have made up my mind.”

A ferocious, not unpleasing thought flashed through Peyrol’s mind. It
was that this intruder on the Escampobar sinister solitude in which he,
Peyrol, kept order, was under a delusion. Mind! Pah! His mind had
nothing to do with his return. He had returned because, in Catherine’s
words, “death had made a sign to him.” Meantime, Lieutenant Réal raised
his hat to wipe his moist brow.

“I made up my mind to play the part of dispatch-bearer. As you have said
yourself, Peyrol, one could not bribe a man--I mean an honest man--so
you will have to find the vessel and leave the rest to me. In two or
three days.... You are under a moral obligation to let me have your
tartane.”

Peyrol did not answer. He was thinking that Réal had got his sign, but
whether it meant death from starvation or disease on board an English
prison hulk, or in some other way, it was impossible to say. This naval
officer was not a man he could trust; to whom he could, for instance,
tell the story of his prisoner and what he had done with him. Indeed,
the story was altogether incredible. The Englishman commanding that
corvette had no visible, conceivable or probable reason for sending a
boat ashore to the cove of all places in the world. Peyrol himself could
hardly believe that it had happened. And he thought: “If I were to tell
that lieutenant he would only think that I was an old scoundrel who had
been in treasonable communication with the English for God knows how
long. No words of mine could persuade him that this was as unforeseen to
me as the moon falling from the sky.”

“I wonder,” he burst out, but not very loud, “what made you keep on
coming back here time after time!” Réal leaned his back against the wall
and folded his arms in the familiar attitude of their leisurely talks.

“Ennui, Peyrol,” he said in a far-away tone. “Confounded boredom.”

Peyrol also, as if unable to resist the force of example, assumed the
same attitude, and said:

“You seem to be a man that makes no friends.”

“True, Peyrol. I think I am that sort of man.”

“What, no friends at all? Not even a little friend of any sort?”

Lieutenant Réal leaned the back of his head against the wall and made no
answer. Peyrol got on his legs.

“Oh then, it wouldn’t matter to anybody if you were to disappear for
years in an English hulk. And so if I were to give you my tartane you
would go?”

“Yes, I would go this moment.”

Peyrol laughed quite loud, tilting his head back. All at once the laugh
stopped short and the lieutenant was amazed to see him reel as though he
had been hit in the chest. While giving way to his bitter mirth, the
rover had caught sight of Arlette’s face at the open window of the
lieutenant’s room. He sat heavily on the bench and was unable to make a
sound. The lieutenant was startled enough to detach the back of his head
from the wall to look at him. Peyrol stooped low suddenly and began to
drag the stable fork from its concealment. Then he got on his feet and
stood leaning on it, glaring down at Réal, who gazed upwards with
languid surprise. Peyrol was asking himself, “Shall I pick him up on
that pair of prongs, carry him down and fling him in the sea?” He felt
suddenly overcome by a heaviness of arms and a heaviness of heart that
made all movement impossible. His stiffened and powerless limbs refused
all service.... Let Catherine look after her niece. He was sure that the
old woman was not very far away. The lieutenant saw him absorbed in
examining the points of the prongs carefully. There was something queer
about all this.

“Hallo, Peyrol! What’s the matter?” he couldn’t help asking.

“I was just looking,” said Peyrol. “One prong is chipped a little. I
found this thing in a most unlikely place.”

The lieutenant still gazed at him curiously.

“I know! It was under the bench.”

“H’m,” said Peyrol, who had recovered some self-control. “It belongs to
Scevola.”

“Does it?” said the lieutenant, falling back again.

His interest seemed exhausted, but Peyrol didn’t move.

“You go about with a face fit for a funeral,” he remarked suddenly in a
deep voice. “Hang it all, lieutenant, I have heard you laugh once or
twice, but the devil take me if I ever saw you smile. It is as if you
had been bewitched in your cradle.”

Lieutenant Réal got up as if moved by a spring. “Bewitched,” he
repeated, standing very stiff: “in my cradle, eh?... No, I don’t think
it was so early as that.”

He walked forward with a tense still face straight at Peyrol as though
he had been blind. Startled, the rover stepped out of the way and,
turning on his heels, followed him with his eyes. The lieutenant paced
on, as if drawn by a magnet, in the direction of the door of the house.
Peyrol, his eyes fastened on Réal’s back, let him nearly reach it before
he called out tentatively: “I say, lieutenant!” To his extreme surprise,
Réal swung round as if to a touch.

“Oh yes,” he answered, also in an undertone. “We will have to discuss
that matter to-morrow.”

Peyrol, who had approached him close, said in a whisper which sounded
quite fierce: “Discuss? No! We will have to carry it out to-morrow. I
have been waiting half the night just to tell you that.”

Lieutenant Réal nodded. The expression on his face was so stony that
Peyrol doubted whether he had understood. He added:

“It isn’t going to be child’s play.” The lieutenant was about to open
the door when Peyrol said: “A moment,” and again the lieutenant turned
about silently.

“Michel is sleeping somewhere on the stairs. Will you just stir him up
and tell him I am waiting outside. We two will have to finish our night
on board the tartane, and start work at break of day to get her ready
for sea. Yes, lieutenant, by noon. In twelve hours’ time you will be
saying good-bye to la belle France.”

Lieutenant Réal’s eyes, staring over his shoulder, seemed glazed and
motionless in the moonlight like the eyes of a dead man. But he went in.
Peyrol heard presently sounds within of somebody staggering in the
passage and Michel projected himself outside headlong, but after a
stumble or two pulled up scratching his head and looking on every side
in the moonlight without perceiving Peyrol, who was regarding him from a
distance of five feet. At last Peyrol said:

“Come, wake up! Michel! Michel!”

“Voilà, notre maître.”

“Look at what I have picked up,” said Peyrol. “Take it and put it away.”

Michel didn’t offer to touch the stable fork extended to him by Peyrol.

“What’s the matter with you?” asked Peyrol.

“Nothing, nothing! Only last time I saw it, it was on Scevola’s
shoulder.” He glanced up at the sky. “A little better than an hour ago.”

“What was he doing?”

“Going into the yard to put it away.”

“Well, now _you_ go into the yard to put it away,” said Peyrol, “and
don’t be long about it.” He waited with his hand over his chin till his
henchman reappeared before him. But Michel had not got over his
surprise.

“He was going to bed, you know,” he said.

“Eh, what? He was going.... He hasn’t gone to sleep in the stable,
perchance? He does sometimes, you know.”

“I know. I looked. He isn’t there,” said Michel, very awake and
round-eyed.

Peyrol started towards the cove. After three or four steps he turned
round and found Michel motionless where he had left him.

“Come on,” he cried, “we will have to fit the tartane for sea directly
the day breaks.”

Standing in the lieutenant’s room just clear of the open window, Arlette
listened to their voices and to the sound of their footsteps diminishing
down the slope. Before they had quite died out she became aware of a
light tread approaching the door of the room.

Lieutenant Réal had spoken the truth. While in Toulon he had more than
once said to himself that he could never go back to that fatal
farmhouse. His mental state was quite pitiable. Honour, decency, every
principle, forbade him to trifle with the feelings of a poor creature
with her mind darkened by a very terrifying, atrocious and, as it were,
guilty experience. And suddenly he had given way to a base impulse and
had betrayed himself by kissing her hand! He recognized with despair
that this was no trifling, but that the impulse had come from the very
depths of his being. It was an awful discovery for a man who on emerging
from boyhood had laid for himself a rigidly straight line of conduct
amongst the unbridled passions and the clamouring falsehoods of
revolution which seemed to have destroyed in him all capacity for the
softer emotions. Taciturn and guarded, he had formed no intimacies.
Relations he had none. He had kept clear of social connections. It was
in his character. At first he visited Escampobar because when he took
his leave he had no place in the world to go to, and a few days there
were a complete change from the odious town. He enjoyed the sense of
remoteness from ordinary mankind. He had developed a liking for old
Peyrol, the only man who had nothing to do with the Revolution--who had
not even seen it at work. The sincere lawlessness of the ex-Brother of
the Coast was refreshing. That one was neither a hypocrite nor a fool.
When he robbed or killed, it was not in the name of the sacred
revolutionary principles or for the love of humanity.

Of course Réal had remarked at once Arlette’s black, profound and
unquiet eyes and the persistent dim smile on her lips, her mysterious
silences and the rare sound of her voice which made a caress of every
word. He heard something of her story from the reluctant Peyrol who did
not care to talk about it. It awakened in Réal more bitter indignation
than pity. But it stimulated his imagination, confirmed him in that
scorn and angry loathing for the Revolution he had felt as a boy and had
nursed secretly ever since. She attracted him by her unapproachable
aspect. Later he tried not to notice that, in common parlance, she was
inclined to hang about him. He used to catch her gazing at him
stealthily. But he was free from masculine vanity. It was one day in
Toulon that it suddenly dawned on him what her mute interest in his
person might mean. He was then sitting outside a café sipping some drink
or other with three or four officers, and not listening to their
uninteresting conversation. He marvelled that this sort of illumination
should come to him like this, under these circumstances; that he should
have thought of her while seated in the street with these men round him,
in the midst of more or less professional talk! And then it suddenly
dawned on him that he had been thinking of nothing but that woman for
days.

He got up brusquely, flung the money for his drink on the table, and
without a word left his companions. But he had the reputation of an
eccentric man and they did not even comment on his abrupt departure. It
was a clear evening. He walked straight out of town, and that night
wandered beyond the fortifications, not noticing the direction he took.
All the countryside was asleep. There was not a human being stirring,
and his progress in that desolate part of the country between the forts
could have been traced only by the barking of dogs in the rare hamlets
and scattered habitations.

“What has become of my rectitude, of my self-respect, of the firmness of
my mind?” he asked himself pedantically. “I have let myself be mastered
by an unworthy passion for a mere mortal envelope stained with crime and
without a mind!”

His despair at this awful discovery was so profound that if he had not
been in uniform he would have tried to commit suicide with the small
pistol he had in his pocket. He shrank from the act, and the thought of
the sensation it would produce, from the gossip and comments it would
raise, the dishonouring suspicions it would provoke. “No,” he said to
himself, “what I will have to do is to unmark my linen, put on civilian
clothes and walk out much farther away, miles beyond the forts, hide
myself in some wood or in an overgrown hollow and put an end to my life
there. The gendarmes or a garde-champêtre discovering my body after a
few days, a complete stranger without marks of identity, and being
unable to find out anything about me, will give me an obscure burial in
some village churchyard.”

On that resolution he turned back abruptly and at daybreak found himself
outside the gate of the town. He had to wait till it was opened, and
then the morning was so far advanced that he had to go straight to work
at his office at the Toulon Admiralty. Nobody noticed anything peculiar
about him that day. He went through his routine tasks with outward
composure, but all the same he never ceased arguing with himself. By the
time he returned to his quarters he had come to the conclusion that as
an officer in war-time he had no right to take his own life. His
principles would not permit him to do that. In this reasoning he was
perfectly sincere. During a deadly struggle against an irreconcilable
enemy his life belonged to his country. But there were moments when his
loneliness, haunted by the forbidden vision of Escampobar with the
figure of that distracted girl, mysterious, awful, pale, irresistible in
her strangeness, passing along the walls, appearing on the hill-paths,
looking out of the window, became unbearable. He spent hours of solitary
anguish shut up in his quarters, and the opinion amongst his comrades
was that Réal’s misanthropy was getting beyond all bounds.

One day it dawned upon him clearly that he could not stand this. It
affected his power of thinking. “I shall begin to talk nonsense to
people,” he said to himself. “Hasn’t there been once a poor devil who
fell in love with a picture or a statue? He used to go and contemplate
it. His misfortune cannot be compared with mine! Well, I will go to look
at her as at a picture too; a picture as untouchable as if it had been
under glass.” And he went on a visit to Escampobar at the very first
opportunity. He made up for himself a repellent face, he clung to Peyrol
for society, out there on the bench, both with their arms folded and
gazing into space. But whenever Arlette crossed his line of sight it was
as if something had moved in his breast. Yet these visits made life just
bearable; they enabled him to attend to his work without beginning to
talk nonsense to people. He said to himself that he was strong enough to
rise above temptation, that he would never overstep the line; but it had
happened to him upstairs in his room at the farm, to weep tears of sheer
tenderness while thinking of his fate. These tears would put out for a
while the gnawing fire of his passion. He assumed austerity like an
armour and in his prudence he, as a matter of fact, looked very seldom
at Arlette for fear of being caught in the act.

The discovery that she had taken to wandering at night had upset him all
the same, because that sort of thing was unaccountable. It gave him a
shock which unsettled, not his resolution, but his fortitude. That
morning he had allowed himself, while she was waiting on him, to be
caught looking at her, and then, losing his self-control, had given her
that kiss on the hand. Directly he had done it he was appalled. He had
overstepped the line. Under the circumstances this was an absolute moral
disaster. The full consciousness of it came to him slowly. In fact, this
moment of fatal weakness was one of the reasons why he had let himself
be sent off so unceremoniously by Peyrol to Toulon. Even while crossing
over he thought the only thing was not to come back any more. Yet while
battling with himself he went on with the execution of the plan. A
bitter irony presided over his dual state. Before leaving the Admiral,
who had received him in full uniform in a room lighted by a single
candle, he was suddenly moved to say: “I suppose if there is no other
way I am authorized to go myself,” and the Admiral had answered: “I
didn’t contemplate that, but if you are willing I don’t see any
objection. I would only advise you to go in uniform in the character of
an officer entrusted with dispatches. No doubt in time the Government
would arrange for your exchange. But bear in mind that it would be a
long captivity, and you must understand it might affect your promotion.”

At the foot of the grand staircase in the lighted hall of the official
building Réal suddenly thought: “And now I must go back to Escampobar.”
Indeed he had to go to Escampobar because the false dispatches were
there in the valise he had left behind. He couldn’t go back to the
Admiral and explain that he had lost them. They would look on him as an
unutterable idiot or a man gone mad. While walking to the quay where the
naval boat was waiting for him he said to himself: “This, in truth, is
my last visit for years--perhaps for life.”

Going back in the boat, notwithstanding that the breeze was very light,
he would not let the men take to the oars. He didn’t want to return
before the women had gone to bed. He said to himself that the proper
and honest thing to do was not to see Arlette again. He even managed to
persuade himself that his uncontrolled impulse had had no meaning for
that witless and unhappy creature. She had neither started, nor
exclaimed; she had made no sign. She had remained passive and then she
had backed away and sat down quietly. He could not even remember that
she had coloured at all. As to himself, he had enough self-control to
rise from the table and go out without looking at her again. Neither did
she make a sign. What could startle that body without mind? She had made
nothing of it, he thought with self-contempt. “Body without mind! Body
without mind!” he repeated with angry derision directed at himself. And
all at once he thought: “No. It isn’t that. All in her is mystery,
seduction, enchantment. And then--what do I care for her mind!”

This thought wrung from him a faint groan, so that the coxswain asked
respectfully: “Are you in pain, mon lieutenant?” “It’s nothing,” he
muttered and set his teeth with the desperation of a man under torture.

While talking with Peyrol outside the house, the words “I won’t see her
again,” and “body without mind,” rang through his head. By the time he
had left Peyrol and walked up the stairs his endurance was absolutely at
an end. All he wanted was to be alone. Going along the dark passage he
noticed that the door of Catherine’s room was standing ajar. But that
did not arrest his attention. He was approaching a state of
insensibility. As he put his hand on the door handle of his room he said
to himself: “It will soon be over!”

He was so tired out that he was almost unable to hold up his head, and
on going in he didn’t see Arlette, who stood against the wall on one
side of the window, out of the moonlight and in the darkest corner of
the room. He only became aware of somebody’s presence in the room as she
flitted past him with the faintest possible rustle, when he staggered
back two paces and heard behind him the key being turned in the lock. If
the whole house had fallen into ruins, bringing him to the ground, he
could not have been more overwhelmed and, in a manner, more utterly
bereft of all his senses. The first that came back to him was the sense
of touch when Arlette seized his hand. He regained his hearing next. She
was whispering to him: “At last! At last! But you are careless. If it
had been Scevola instead of me in this room you would have been dead
now. I have seen him at work.” He felt a significant pressure on his
hand, but he couldn’t see her properly yet, though he was aware of her
nearness with every fibre of his body. “It wasn’t yesterday though,” she
added in a low tone. Then suddenly: “Come to the window so that I may
look at you.”

A great square of moonlight lay on the floor. He obeyed the tug like a
little child. She caught hold of his other hand as it hung by his side.
He was rigid all over, without joints, and it did not seem to him that
he was breathing. With her face a little below his, she stared at him
closely, whispering gently: “Eugène, Eugène,” and suddenly the livid
immobility of his face frightened her. “You say nothing. You look ill.
What is the matter? Are you hurt?” She let go his insensitive hands and
began to feel him all over for evidence of some injury. She even
snatched off his hat and flung it away in her haste to discover that
his head was unharmed; but finding no sign of bodily damage, she calmed
down like a sensible, practical person. With her hands clasped round his
neck she hung back a little. Her little even teeth gleamed, her black
eyes, immensely profound, looked into his, not with a transport of
passion or fear, but with a sort of reposeful satisfaction, with a
searching and appropriating expression. He came back to life with a low
and reckless exclamation, felt horribly insecure at once as if he were
standing on a lofty pinnacle above a noise as of breaking waves in his
ears, in fear lest her fingers should part and she would fall off and be
lost to him for ever. He flung his arms round her waist and hugged her
close to his breast. In the great silence, in the bright moonlight
falling through the window, they stood like that for a long, long time.
He looked at her head resting on his shoulder. Her eyes were closed, and
the expression of her unsmiling face was that of a delightful dream,
something infinitely ethereal, peaceful and, as it were, eternal. Its
appeal pierced his heart with a pointed sweetness. “She is exquisite.
It’s a miracle,” he thought with a sort of terror. “It’s impossible.”

She made a movement to disengage herself, and instinctively he resisted,
pressing her closer to his breast. She yielded for a moment and then
tried again. He let her go. She stood at arm’s length, her hands on his
shoulders, and her charm struck him suddenly as funny in the seriousness
of expression as of a very capable, practical woman.

“All this is very well,” she said in a business-like undertone. “We will
have to think how to get away from here. I don’t mean now, this moment,”
she added, feeling his slight start. “Scevola is thirsting for your
blood.” She detached one hand to point a finger at the inner wall of the
room, and lowered her voice. “He’s there, you know. Don’t trust Peyrol
either. I was looking at you two out there. He has changed. I can trust
him no longer.” Her murmur vibrated. “He and Catherine behave strangely.
I don’t know what came to them. He doesn’t talk to me. When I sit down
near him he turns his shoulder to me....”

She felt Réal sway under her hands, paused in concern and said: “You are
tired.” But as he didn’t move, she actually led him to a chair, pushed
him into it, and sat on the floor at his feet. She rested her head
against his knees and kept possession of one of his hands. A sigh
escaped her. “I knew this was going to be,” she said very low. “But I
was taken by surprise.”

“Oh, you knew it was going to be,” he repeated faintly.

“Yes! I had prayed for it. Have you ever been prayed for, Eugène?” she
asked, lingering on his name with delight.

“Not since I was a child,” answered Réal in a sombre tone.

“Oh yes! You have been prayed for to-day. I went down to the church....”
Réal could hardly believe his ears.... “The abbé let me in by the
sacristy door. He told me to renounce the world. I was ready to renounce
anything for you.” Réal, turning his face to the darkest part of the
room, seemed to see the spectre of fatality awaiting its time to move
forward and crush that calm, confident joy. He shook off the dreadful
illusion, raised her hand to his lips for a lingering kiss, and then
asked:

“So you knew that it was going to be? Everything? Yes! And of me, what
did you think?”

She pressed strongly the hand to which she had been clinging all the
time. “I thought this.”

“But what did you think of my conduct at times? You see, I did not know
what was going to be. I ... I was afraid,” he added under his breath.

“Conduct? What conduct? You came, you went. When you were not here I
thought of you, and when you were here I could look my fill at you. I
tell you I knew how it was going to be. I was not afraid then.”

“You went about with a little smile,” he whispered, as one would mention
an inconceivable marvel.

“I was warm and quiet,” murmured Arlette, as if on the borders of
dreamland. Tender murmurs flowed from her lips describing a state of
blissful tranquillity in phrases that sounded like the veriest nonsense,
incredible, convincing and soothing to Réal’s conscience.

“You were perfect,” it went on. “Whenever you came near me everything
seemed different.”

“What do you mean? How different?”

“Altogether. The light, the very stones of the house, the hills, the
little flowers amongst the rocks! Even Nanette was different.”

Nanette was a white Angora with long silken hair, a pet that lived
mostly in the yard.

“Oh, Nanette was different too,” said Réal, whom delight in the
modulations of that voice had cut off from all reality, and even from a
consciousness of himself, while he sat stooping over that head resting
against his knee, the soft grip of her hand being his only contact with
the world.

“Yes. Prettier. It’s only the people....” She ceased on an uncertain
note. The crested wave of enchantment seemed to have passed over his
head, ebbing out faster than the sea, leaving the dreary expanses of the
sand. He felt a chill at the roots of his hair.

“What people?” he asked.

“They are so changed. Listen, to-night while you were away--why did you
go away?--I caught those two in the kitchen, saying nothing to each
other. That Peyrol--he is terrible.”

He was struck by the tone of awe, by its profound conviction. He could
not know that Peyrol, unforeseen, unexpected, inexplicable, had given by
his mere appearance at Escampobar a moral and even a physical jolt to
all her being, that he was to her an immense figure, like a messenger
from the unknown entering the solitude of Escampobar; something
immensely strong, with inexhaustible power, unaffected by familiarity
and remaining invincible.

“He will say nothing, he will listen to nothing. He can do what he
likes.”

“Can he?” muttered Réal.

She sat up on the floor, moved her head up and down several times as if
to say that there could be no doubt about that.

“Is he, too, thirsting for my blood?” asked Réal bitterly.

“No, no. It isn’t that. You could defend yourself. I could watch over
you. I have been watching over you. Only two nights ago I thought I
heard noises outside and I went downstairs, fearing for you; your
window was open but I could see nobody, and yet I felt.... No, it isn’t
that! It’s worse. I don’t know what he wants to do. I can’t help being
fond of him, but I begin to fear him now. When he first came here and I
saw him he was just the same--only his hair was not so white--big,
quiet. It seemed to me that something moved in my head. He was gentle,
you know. I had to smile at him. It was as if I had recognized him. I
said to myself: ‘That’s he, the man himself.’”

“And when I came?” asked Réal with a feeling of dismay.

“You! You were expected,” she said in a low tone, with a slight tinge of
surprise at the question, but still evidently thinking of the Peyrol
mystery. “Yes, I caught them at it last evening, he and Catherine, in
the kitchen, looking at each other and as quiet as mice. I told him he
couldn’t order me about. Oh, mon chéri, mon chéri, don’t you listen to
Peyrol--don’t let him....”

With only a slight touch on his knee she sprang to her feet. Réal stood
up too.

“He can do nothing to me,” he mumbled.

“Don’t tell him anything. Nobody can guess what he thinks, and now even
I cannot tell what he means when he speaks. It was as if he knew a
secret.” She put an accent into those words which made Réal feel moved
almost to tears. He repeated that Peyrol could have no influence over
him, and he felt that he was speaking the truth. He was in the power of
his own word. Ever since he had left the Admiral in a gold-embroidered
uniform, impatient to return to his guests, he was on a service for
which he had volunteered. For a moment he had the sensation of an iron
hoop very tight round his chest. She peered at his face closely, and it
was more than he could bear.

“All right. I’ll be careful,” he said. “And Catherine, is she also
dangerous?”

In the sheen of the moonlight Arlette, her neck and head above the
gleams of the fichu, visible and elusive, smiled at him and moved a step
closer.

“Poor Aunt Catherine,” she said.... “Put your arm round me, Eugène....
She can do nothing. She used to follow me with her eyes always. She
thought I didn’t notice, but I did. And now she seems unable to look me
in the face. Peyrol too, for that matter. He used to follow me with his
eyes. Often I wondered what made them look at me like that. Can you
tell, Eugène? But it’s all changed now.”

“Yes, it is all changed,” said Réal in a tone which he tried to make as
light as possible. “Does Catherine know you are here?”

“When we went upstairs this evening I lay down all dressed on my bed and
she sat on hers. The candle was out, but in the moonlight I could see
her quite plainly with her hands on her lap. When I could lie still no
longer I simply got up and went out of the room. She was still sitting
at the foot of her bed. All I did was to put my finger on my lips and
then she dropped her head. I don’t think I quite closed the door....
Hold me tighter, Eugène, I am tired.... Strange, you know! Formerly, a
long time ago, before I ever saw you, I never rested and never felt
tired.” She stopped her murmur suddenly and lifted a finger
recommending silence. She listened and Réal listened too, he did not
know for what; and in this sudden concentration on a point, all that had
happened since he had entered the room seemed to him a dream in its
improbability and in the more than lifelike force dreams have in their
inconsequence. Even the woman letting herself go on his arm seemed to
have no weight as it might have happened in a dream.

“She is there,” breathed Arlette suddenly, rising on tiptoe to reach up
to his ear. “She must have heard you go past.”

“Where is she?” asked Réal with the same intense secrecy.

“Outside the door. She must have been listening to the murmur of our
voices....” Arlette breathed into his ear as if relating an enormity.
“She told me one day that I was one of those who are fit for no man’s
arms.”

At this he flung his other arm round her and looked into her enlarged as
if frightened eyes, while she clasped him with all her strength and they
stood like that a long time, lips pressed on lips without a kiss and
breathless in the closeness of their contact. To him the stillness
seemed to extend to the limits of the universe. The thought “Am I going
to die?” flashed through that stillness and lost itself in it like a
spark flying in an everlasting night. The only result of it was the
tightening of his hold on Arlette.

An aged and uncertain voice was heard uttering the word “Arlette.”
Catherine, who had been listening to their murmurs, could not bear the
long silence. They heard her trembling tones as distinctly as though
she had been in the room. Réal felt as if it had saved his life. They
separated silently.

“Go away,” called out Arlette.

“Arl....”

“Be quiet,” she cried louder. “You can do nothing.”

“Arlette,” came through the door, tremulous and commanding.

“She will wake up Scevola,” remarked Arlette to Réal in a conversational
tone. And they both waited for sounds that did not come. Arlette pointed
her finger at the wall. “He is there, you know.”

“He is asleep,” muttered Réal. But the thought “I am lost” which he
formulated in his mind had no reference to Scevola.

“He is afraid,” said Arlette contemptuously in an undertone. “But that
means little. He would quake with fright one moment and rush out to do
murder the next.”

Slowly, as if drawn by the irresistible authority of the old woman, they
had been moving towards the door. Réal thought with the sudden
enlightenment of passion: “If she does not go now I won’t have the
strength to part from her in the morning.” He had no image of death
before his eyes but of a long and intolerable separation. A sigh verging
upon a moan reached them from the other side of the door and made the
air around them heavy with sorrow against which locks and keys will not
avail.

“You had better go to her,” he whispered in a penetrating tone.

“Of course I will,” said Arlette with some feeling. “Poor old thing. She
and I have only each other in the world, but I am the daughter here, she
must do what I tell her.” With one of her hands on Réal’s shoulder she
put her mouth close to the door and said distinctly:

“I am coming directly. Go back to your room and wait for me,” as if she
had no doubt of being obeyed.

A profound silence ensued. Perhaps Catherine had gone already. Réal and
Arlette stood still for a whole minute as if both had been changed into
stone.

“Go now,” said Réal in a hoarse, hardly audible voice.

She gave him a quick kiss on the lips, and again they stood like a pair
of enchanted lovers bewitched into immobility.

“If she stays on,” thought Réal, “I shall never have the courage to tear
myself away, and then I shall have to blow my brains out.” But when at
last she moved he seized her again and held her as if she had been his
very life. When he let her go he was appalled by hearing a very faint
laugh of her secret joy.

“Why do you laugh?” he asked in a scared tone.

She stopped to answer him over her shoulder.

“I laughed because I thought of all the days to come. Days and days and
days. Have you thought of them?”

“Yes,” Réal faltered, like a man stabbed to the heart, holding the door
half open. And he was glad to have something to hold on to.

She slipped out with a soft rustle of her silk skirt, but before he had
time to close the door behind her she put back her arm for an instant.
He had just time to press the palm of her hand to his lips. It was cool.
She snatched it away and he had the strength of mind to shut the door
after her. He felt like a man chained to the wall and dying of thirst,
from whom a cold drink is snatched away. The room became dark suddenly.
He thought, “A cloud over the moon, a cloud over the moon, an enormous
cloud,” while he walked rigidly to the window, insecure and swaying as
if on a tight rope. After a moment he perceived the moon in a sky on
which there was no sign of the smallest cloud anywhere. He said to
himself: “I suppose I nearly died just now. But no,” he went on thinking
with deliberate cruelty, “oh no, I shall not die. I shall only suffer,
suffer, suffer....”

“Suffer, suffer.” Only by stumbling against the side of the bed did he
discover that he had gone away from the window. At once he flung himself
on it violently with his face buried in the pillow, which he bit to
restrain the cry of distress about to burst through his lips. Natures
schooled into insensibility, when once overcome by a mastering passion
are, like vanquished giants, ready for despair. He, a man on service,
felt himself shrinking from death and that doubt contained in itself all
possible doubts of his own fortitude. The only thing he knew was that he
would be gone to-morrow morning. He shuddered along his whole extended
length, then lay still gripping a handful of bedclothes in each hand to
prevent himself from leaping up in panicky restlessness. He was saying
to himself pedantically, “I must lie down and rest, I must rest to have
strength for to-morrow, I must rest,” while the tremendous struggle to
keep still broke out in waves of perspiration on his forehead. At last
sudden oblivion must have descended on him because he turned over and
sat up suddenly with the sound of the word “Ecoutez” in his ears.

A strange, dim, cold light filled the room; a light he did not recognize
for anything he had known before, and at the foot of his bed stood a
figure in dark garments with a dark shawl over its head, with a
fleshless predatory face and dark hollows for its eyes, silent,
expectant, implacable.... “Is this death?” he asked himself, staring at
it terrified. It resembled Catherine. It said again: “Ecoutez.” He took
away his eyes from it, and glancing down noticed that his clothes were
torn open on his chest. He would not look up at that thing, whatever it
was, spectre or old woman, and said:

“Yes, I hear you.”

“You are an honest man.” It was Catherine’s unemotional voice. “The day
has broken. You will go away.”

“Yes,” he said without raising his head.

“She is asleep,” went on Catherine or whoever it was, “exhausted, and
you would have to shake her hard before she would wake. You will go. You
know,” the voice continued inflexibly, “she is my niece, and you know
that there is death in the folds of her skirt and blood about her feet.
She is for no man.”

Réal felt all the anguish of an unearthly experience. This thing that
looked like Catherine and spoke like a cruel fate had to be faced. He
raised his head in this light that seemed to him appalling and not of
this world.

“Listen well to me, you too,” he said. “If she had all the madness of
the world and the sin of all the murders of the Revolution on her
shoulders I would still hug her to my breast. Do you understand?”

The apparition which resembled Catherine lowered and raised its hooded
head slowly. “There was a time when I could have hugged l’enfer même to
my breast. He went away. He had his vow. You have only your honesty. You
will go.”

“I have my duty,” said Lieutenant Réal in measured tones, as if calmed
by the excess of horror that old woman inspired him with.

“Go without disturbing her, without looking at her.”

“I will carry my shoes in my hand,” he said. He sighed deeply and felt
as if sleepy. “It is very early,” he muttered.

“Peyrol is already down at the well,” announced Catherine. “What can he
be doing there all this time?” she added in a troubled voice. Réal, with
his feet now on the ground, gave her a side glance; but she was already
gliding away, and when he looked again she had vanished from the room
and the door was shut.




XV


Catherine, going downstairs, found Peyrol still at the well. He seemed
to be looking into it with extreme interest.

“Your coffee is ready, Peyrol,” she shouted to him from the doorway.

He turned very sharply like a man surprised and came along smiling.

“That’s pleasant news, Mademoiselle Catherine,” he said. “You are down
early.”

“Yes,” she admitted, “but you too, Peyrol. Is Michel about? Let him come
and have some coffee too.”

“Michel’s at the tartane. Perhaps you don’t know that she is going to
make a little voyage.” He drank a mouthful of coffee and took a bite out
of a slice of bread. He was hungry. He had been up all night and had
even had a conversation with Citizen Scevola. He had also done some work
with Michel after daylight; however, there had not been much to do
because the tartane was always kept ready for sea. Then after having
locked up again Citizen Scevola, who was extremely concerned as to what
was going to happen to him but was left in a state of uncertainty, he
had come up to the farm, had gone upstairs, where he was busy with
various things for a time, and then had stolen down very cautiously to
the well, where Catherine, whom he had not expected downstairs so
early, had seen him before she went into Lieutenant Réal’s room. While
he enjoyed his coffee he listened without any signs of surprise to
Catherine’s comments upon the disappearance of Scevola. She had looked
into his den. He had not slept on his pallet last night, of that she was
certain, and he was nowhere to be seen, not even in the most distant
field, from the points of vantage around the farm. It was inconceivable
that he should have slipped away to Madrague, where he disliked to go,
or to the village, where he was afraid to go. Peyrol remarked that
whatever happened to him he was no great loss, but Catherine was not to
be soothed.

“It frightens a body,” she said. “He may be hiding somewhere to jump on
one treacherously. You know what I mean, Peyrol.”

“Well, the lieutenant will have nothing to fear, as he’s going away. As
to myself, Scevola and I are good friends. I had a long talk with him
quite recently. You two women can manage him perfectly; and then, who
knows, perhaps he has gone away for good.”

Catherine stared at him, if such a word as stare can be applied to a
profound contemplative gaze. “The lieutenant has nothing to fear from
him,” she repeated cautiously.

“No, he is going away. Didn’t you know it?” The old woman continued to
look at him profoundly. “Yes, he is on service.”

For another minute or so Catherine continued silent in her contemplative
attitude. Then her hesitation came to an end. She could not resist the
desire to inform Peyrol of the events of the night. As she went on
Peyrol forgot the half-full bowl of coffee and his half-eaten piece of
bread. Catherine’s voice flowed with austerity. She stood there,
imposing and solemn like a peasant-priestess. The relation of what had
been to her a soul-shaking experience did not take much time, and she
finished with the words, “The lieutenant is an honest man.” And after a
pause she insisted further: “There is no denying it. He has acted like
an honest man.”

For a moment longer Peyrol continued to look at the coffee in the bowl,
then without warning got up with such violence that the chair behind him
was thrown back upon the flagstones.

“Where is he, that honest man?” he shouted suddenly in stentorian tones
which not only caused Catherine to raise her hands, but frightened
himself, and he dropped at once to a mere forcible utterance. “Where is
that man? Let me see him.”

Even Catherine’s hieratic composure was disturbed.

“Why?” she said, looking really disconcerted, “he will be down here
directly. This bowl of coffee is for him.”

Peyrol made as if to leave the kitchen, but Catherine stopped him. “For
God’s sake, Monsieur Peyrol,” she said, half in entreaty and half in
command, “don’t wake up the child. Let her sleep. Oh, let her sleep!
Don’t wake her up. God only knows how long it is since she has slept
properly. I could not tell you. I daren’t think of it.” She was shocked
by hearing Peyrol declare: “All this is confounded nonsense.” But he sat
down again, seemed to catch sight of the coffee bowl and emptied what
was left in it down his throat.

“I don’t want her on my hands more crazy than she has been before,” said
Catherine in a sort of exasperation but in a very low tone. This phrase
in its selfish form expressed a real and profound compassion for her
niece. She dreaded the moment when that fatal Arlette would wake up and
the dreadful complications of life which her slumbers had suspended
would have to be picked up again. Peyrol fidgeted on his seat.

“And so he told you he was going? He actually did tell you that?” he
asked.

“He promised to go before the child wakes up.... At once.”

“But, sacré nom d’un chien, there is never any wind before eleven
o’clock,” Peyrol exclaimed in a tone of profound annoyance, yet trying
to moderate his voice, while Catherine, indulgent to his changing moods,
only compressed her lips and nodded at him soothingly. “It is impossible
to work with people like that,” he mumbled.

“Do you know, Monsieur Peyrol, that she has been to see the priest?”
Catherine was heard suddenly towering above her end of the table. The
two women had had a talk before Arlette had been induced by her aunt to
lie down. Peyrol gave a start.

“What? Priest?... Now look here, Catherine,” he went on with repressed
ferocity, “do you imagine that all this interests me in the least?”

“I can think of nothing but that niece of mine. We two have nobody but
each other in the world,” she went on, reproducing the very phrase
Arlette had used to Réal. She seemed to be thinking aloud, but noticed
that Peyrol was listening with attention. “He wanted to shut her up
from everybody,” and the old woman clasped her meagre hands with a
sudden gesture. “I suppose there are still some convents about the
world.”

“You and the patronne are mad together,” declared Peyrol. “All this only
shows what an ass the curé is. I don’t know much about these things,
though I have seen some nuns in my time, and some very queer ones too,
but it seems to me that they don’t take crazy people into convents.
Don’t you be afraid. I tell you that.” He stopped, because the inner
door of the kitchen came open and Lieutenant Réal stepped in. His sword
hung on his forearm by the belt, his hat was on his head. He dropped his
little valise on the floor and sat down in the nearest chair to put on
his shoes, which he had brought down in his other hand. Then he came up
to the table. Peyrol, who had kept his eyes on him, thought: “Here is
one who looks like a moth scorched in the fire.” Réal’s eyes were sunk,
his cheeks seemed hollowed, and the whole face had an arid and dry
aspect.

“Well, you are in a fine state for the work of deceiving the enemy,”
Peyrol observed. “Why, to look at you, nobody would believe a word you
said. You are not going to be ill, I hope. You are on service. You
haven’t got the right to be ill. I say, Mademoiselle Catherine, produce
the bottle, you know, my private bottle....” He snatched it from
Catherine’s hand, poured some brandy into the lieutenant’s coffee,
pushed the bowl towards him and waited. “Nom de nom!” he said forcibly,
“don’t you know what this is for? It’s for you to drink.” Réal obeyed
with a strange, automatic docility. “And now,” said Peyrol, getting up,
“I will go to my room and shave. This is a great day--the day we are
going to see the lieutenant off.”

Till then Réal had not uttered a word, but directly the door closed
behind Peyrol he raised his head.

“Catherine!” His voice was like a rustle in his throat. She was looking
at him steadily, and he continued: “Listen, when she finds I am gone you
tell her I will return soon. To-morrow. Always to-morrow.”

“Yes, my good Monsieur,” said Catherine in an unmoved voice but clasping
her hands convulsively. “There is nothing else I would dare tell her!”

“She will believe you,” whispered Réal wildly.

“Yes! She will believe me,” repeated Catherine in a mournful tone.

Réal got up, put the sword-belt over his head, picked up the valise.
There was a little flush on his cheeks.

“Adieu,” he said to the silent old woman. She made no answer, but as he
turned away she raised her hand a little, hesitated, and let it fall
again. It seemed to her that the women of Escampobar had been singled
out for divine wrath. Her niece appeared to her like the scapegoat
charged with all the murders and blasphemies of the Revolution. She
herself, too, had been cast out from the grace of God. But that had been
a long time ago. She had made her peace with Heaven since. Again she
raised her hand and, this time, made in the air the sign of the cross at
the back of Lieutenant Réal.

Meanwhile, upstairs Peyrol, scraping his big flat cheek with an English
razor-blade at the window, saw Lieutenant Réal on the path to the shore;
and high above there, commanding a vast view of sea and land, he
shrugged his shoulders impatiently with no visible provocation. One
could not trust those epaulette-wearers. They would cram a fellow’s head
with notions either for their own sake or for the sake of the service.
Still, he was too old a bird to be caught with chaff; and besides, that
long-legged stiff beggar going down the path, with all his officer airs,
was honest enough. At any rate he knew a seaman when he saw one, though
he was as cold-blooded as a fish. Peyrol had a smile which was a little
awry.

Cleaning the razor-blade (one of a set of twelve in a case) he had a
vision of a brilliantly hazy ocean and an English Indiaman with her
yards braced all ways, her canvas blowing loose above her blood-stained
decks overrun by a lot of privateersmen, and with the island of Ceylon
swelling like a thin blue cloud on the far horizon. He had always wished
to own a set of English blades and there he had got it, fell over it as
it were, lying on the floor of a cabin which had been already ransacked.
“For good steel--it was good steel,” he thought, looking at the blade
fixedly. And there it was, nearly worn out. The others too. That steel!
And here he was, holding the case in his hand as though he had just
picked it up from the floor. Same case. Same man. And the steel worn
out.

He shut the case brusquely, flung it into his sea-chest, which was
standing open, and slammed the lid down. The feeling which was in his
breast, and had been known to more articulate men than himself, was that
life was a dream less substantial than the vision of Ceylon lying like a
cloud on the sea. Dream left astern. Dream straight ahead. This
disenchanted philosophy took the shape of fierce swearing. “Sacré nom
de nom de nom.... Tonnerre de bon Dieu!”

While tying his neckcloth he handled it with fury as though he meant to
strangle himself with it. He rammed a soft cap on to his venerable locks
recklessly, seized his cudgel--but before leaving the room walked up to
the window giving on the east. He could not see the Petite Passe on
account of the lookout hill, but to the left a great portion of the
Hyères Roadstead lay spread out before him, pale grey in the morning
light, with the land about Cape Blanc swelling in the distance with all
its details blurred as yet and only one conspicuous object presenting to
his sight something that might have been a lighthouse by its shape, but
which Peyrol knew very well was the English corvette already under way
and with all her canvas set.

This sight pleased Peyrol mainly because he had expected it. The
Englishman was doing exactly what he had expected he would do, and
Peyrol looked towards the English cruiser with a smile of malicious
triumph as if he were confronting her captain. For some reason or other
he imagined Captain Vincent as long-faced, with yellow teeth and a wig,
whereas that officer wore his own hair and had a set of teeth which
would have done honour to a London belle, and was really the hidden
cause of Captain Vincent appearing so often wreathed in smiles.

That ship at this great distance and steering in his direction held
Peyrol at the window long enough for the increasing light of the morning
to burst into sunshine, colouring and filling-in the flat outline of the
land with tints of wood and rock and field, with clear dots of
buildings enlivening the view. The sun threw a sort of halo around the
ship. Recollecting himself, Peyrol left the room and shut the door
quietly. Quietly too he descended the stairs from his garret. On the
landing he underwent a short inward struggle, at the end of which he
approached the door of Catherine’s room and opening it a little, put his
head in. Across the whole width of it he saw Arlette fast asleep. Her
aunt had thrown a light coverlet over her. Her low shoes stood at the
foot of the bed. Her black hair lay loose on the pillow; and Peyrol’s
gaze became arrested by the long eyelashes on her pale cheek. Suddenly
he fancied she moved, and he withdrew his head sharply, pulling the door
to. He listened for a moment as if tempted to open it again, but judging
it too risky, continued on his way downstairs. At his reappearance in
the kitchen Catherine turned sharply. She was dressed for the day, with
a big white cap on her head, a black bodice and a brown skirt with ample
folds. She had a pair of varnished sabots on her feet over her shoes.

“No signs of Scevola,” she said, advancing towards Peyrol. “And Michel,
too, has not been here yet.”

Peyrol thought that if she had been only shorter, what with her black
eyes and slightly curved nose she would have looked like a witch. But
witches can read people’s thoughts, and he looked openly at Catherine
with the pleasant conviction that she could not read his thoughts. He
said:

“I took good care not to make any noise upstairs, Mademoiselle
Catherine. When I am gone the house will be empty and quiet enough.”

She had a curious expression. She struck Peyrol suddenly as if she were
lost in that kitchen in which she had reigned for many years. He
continued:

“You will be alone all the morning.”

She seemed to be listening to some distant sound, and after Peyrol had
added, “Everything is all right now,” she nodded, and after a moment
said in a manner that for her was unexpectedly impulsive:

“Monsieur Peyrol, I am tired of life.”

He shrugged his shoulders and with somewhat sinister jocosity remarked:

“I will tell you what it is; you ought to have been married.”

She turned her back on him abruptly.

“No offence,” Peyrol excused himself in a tone of gloom rather than of
apology. “It is no use to attach any importance to things. What is this
life? Phew! Nobody can remember one-tenth of it. Here I am; and, you
know, I would bet that if one of my old-time chums came along and saw me
like this, here with you--I mean one of those chums that stand up for a
fellow in a scrimmage and look after him should he be hurt--well, I
bet,” he repeated, “he wouldn’t know me. He would say to himself,
perhaps, ‘Hullo! here’s a comfortable married couple.’”

He paused. Catherine, with her back to him and calling him, not
Monsieur, but Peyrol, _tout court_, remarked, not exactly with
displeasure, but rather with an ominous accent, that this was no time
for idle talk. Peyrol, however, continued, though his tone was very far
from being that of idle talk:

“But you see, Mademoiselle Catherine, you were not like the others. You
allowed yourself to be struck all of a heap, and at the same time you
were too hard on yourself.”

Her long thin frame, bent low to work the bellows under the enormous
overmantel, she assented: “Perhaps! We Escampobar women were always hard
on ourselves.”

“That’s what I say. If you had had things happen to you which happened
to me....”

“But you men, you are different. It doesn’t matter what you do. You have
got your own strength. You need not be hard on yourselves. You go from
one thing to another thoughtlessly.”

He remained looking at her searchingly, with something like a hint of a
smile on his shaven lips, but she turned away to the sink, where one of
the women working about the farm had deposited a great pile of
vegetables. She started on them with a broken-bladed knife, preserving
her sibylline air, even in that homely occupation.

“It will be a good soup, I see, at noon to-day,” said the rover
suddenly. He turned on his heels and went out through the salle. The
whole world lay open to him, or at any rate the whole of the
Mediterranean, viewed down the ravine between the two hills. The bell of
the farm’s milch-cow, which had a talent for keeping herself invisible,
reached him from the right, but he could not see as much as the tips of
her horns, though he looked for them. He stepped out sturdily. He had
not gone twenty yards down the ravine when another sound made him stand
still as if changed into stone. It was a faint noise resembling very
much the hollow rumble an empty farm-cart would make on a stony road,
but Peyrol looked up at the sky, and though it was perfectly clear, he
did not seem pleased with its aspect. He had a hill on each side of him
and the placid cove below his feet. He muttered “H’m! Thunder at
sunrise. It must be in the west. It only wanted that!” He feared it
would first kill the little breeze there was and then knock the weather
up altogether. For a moment all his faculties seemed paralysed by that
faint sound. On that sea ruled by the gods of Olympus he might have been
a pagan mariner subject to Jupiter’s caprices; but like a defiant pagan
he shook his fist vaguely at space, which answered him by a short and
threatening mutter. Then he swung on his way till he caught sight of the
two mastheads of the tartane, when he stopped to listen. No sound of any
sort reached him from there, and he went on his way thinking, “‘Go from
one thing to another thoughtlessly’! Indeed!... That’s all old Catherine
knows about it.” He had so many things to think of that he did not know
which to lay hold of first. He just let them lie jumbled up in his head.
His feelings too were in a state of confusion, and vaguely he felt that
his conduct was at the mercy of an internal conflict. The consciousness
of that fact accounted perhaps for his sardonic attitude towards himself
and outwardly towards those whom he perceived on board the tartane, and
especially towards the lieutenant, whom he saw sitting on the deck
leaning against the head of the rudder, characteristically aloof from
the two other persons on board. Michel, also characteristically, was
standing on the top of the little cabin scuttle, obviously looking out
for his “maître.” Citizen Scevola, sitting on deck, seemed at first
sight to be at liberty, but as a matter of fact he was not. He was
loosely tied up to a stanchion by three turns of the mainsheet with the
knot in such a position that he could not get at it without attracting
attention; and that situation seemed also somewhat characteristic of
Citizen Scevola with its air of half liberty, half suspicion and, as it
were, contemptuous restraint. The sans-culotte, whose late
experiences had nearly unsettled his reason, first by their utter
incomprehensibility and afterwards by the enigmatical attitude of
Peyrol, had dropped his head and folded his arms on his breast. And that
attitude was dubious, too. It might have been resignation or it might
have been profound sleep. The rover addressed himself first to the
lieutenant.

“Le moment approche,” said Peyrol with a queer twitch at a corner of his
lip, while under his soft woollen cap his venerable locks stirred in the
breath of a suddenly warm air. “The great moment--eh?”

He leaned over the big tiller, and seemed to be hovering above the
lieutenant’s shoulder.

“What’s this infernal company?” murmured the latter without even looking
at Peyrol.

“All old friends--quoi?” said Peyrol in a homely tone. “We will keep
that little affair amongst ourselves. The fewer the men, the greater the
glory. Catherine is getting the vegetables ready for the noonday soup
and the Englishman is coming down towards the Passe, where he will
arrive about noon too, ready to have his eye put out. You know,
lieutenant, that will be your job. You may depend on me for sending you
off when the moment comes. For what is it to you? You have no friends,
you have not even a petite amie. As to expecting an old rover like
me--oh no, lieutenant! Of course liberty is sweet, but what do you know
of it, you epaulette-wearers? Moreover, I am no good for quarter-deck
talks and all that politeness.”

“I wish, Peyrol, you would not talk so much,” said Lieutenant Réal,
turning his head slightly. He was struck by the strange expression on
the old rover’s face. “And I don’t see what the actual moment matters. I
am going to look for the fleet. All you have to do is to hoist the sails
for me and then scramble ashore.”

“Very simple,” observed Peyrol through his teeth, and then began to
sing:

    “Quoique leurs chapeaux sont bien laids
     God-dam! Moi, j’aime les Anglais
          Ils ont un si bon caractère!”

but interrupted himself suddenly to hail Scevola:

“Hé! Citoyen!” and then remarked confidentially to Réal: “He isn’t
asleep, you know, but he isn’t like the English, he has a sacré mauvais
caractère. He got into his head,” continued Peyrol, in a loud and
innocent tone, “that you locked him up in this cabin last night. Did you
notice the venomous glance he gave you just now?”

Both Lieutenant Réal and the innocent Michel appeared surprised at his
boisterousness; but all the time Peyrol was thinking: “I wish to
goodness I knew how that thunderstorm is getting on and what course it
is shaping. I can’t find that out unless I go up to the farm and get a
view to the westward. It may be as far as the Rhône Valley; no doubt it
is and it will come out of it too, curses on it. One won’t be able to
reckon on half an hour of steady wind from any quarter.” He directed a
look of ironic gaiety at all the faces in turn. Michel met it with a
faithful-dog gaze and innocently open mouth. Scevola kept his chin
buried on his chest. Lieutenant Réal was insensible to outward
impressions, and his absent stare made nothing of Peyrol. The rover
himself presently fell into thought. The last stir of air died out in
the little basin, and the sun clearing Porquerolles inundated it with a
sudden light, in which Michel blinked like an owl.

“It’s hot early,” he announced aloud, but only because he had formed the
habit of talking to himself. He would not have presumed to offer an
opinion unless asked by Peyrol.

His voice having recalled Peyrol to himself, he proposed to masthead the
yards, and even asked Lieutenant Réal to help in that operation, which
was accomplished in silence, except for the faint squeaking of the
blocks. The sails, however, were kept hauled up in the gear.

“Like this,” said Peyrol, “you have only to let go the ropes and you
will be under canvas at once.”

Without answering Réal returned to his position by the rudder-head. He
was saying to himself: “I am sneaking off. No, there is honour, duty.
And of course I will return. But when? They will forget all about me and
I shall never be exchanged. This war may last for years,--” and
illogically he wished he could have had a God to whom he could pray for
relief in his anguish. “She will be in despair,” he thought, writhing
inwardly at the mental picture of a distracted Arlette. Life, however,
had embittered his spirit early, and he said to himself: “But in a
month’s time will she even give me a thought?” Instantly he felt
remorseful with a remorse strong enough to lift him to his feet as if he
were morally obliged to go up again and confess to Arlette this
sacrilegious cynicism of thought. “I am mad,” he muttered, perching
himself on the low rail. His lapse from faith plunged him into such a
depth of unhappiness that he felt all his strength of will go out of
him. He sat there apathetic and suffering. He meditated dully: “Young
men have been known to die suddenly; why should not I? I am, as a matter
of fact, at the end of my endurance. I am half dead already. Yes! but
what is left of that life does not belong to me now.”

“Peyrol,” he said, in such a piercing tone that even Scevola jerked his
head up; but he made an effort to reduce his shrillness and went on
speaking very carefully: “I have left a letter for the Secretary-General
at the Majorité to pay twenty-five hundred francs to Jean--you are Jean,
are you not?--Peyrol, price of the tartane in which I sail. Is that
right?”

“What did you do that for?” asked Peyrol with an extremely stony face.
“To get me into trouble?”

“Don’t be a fool, gunner, nobody remembers your name. It is buried under
a stack of blackened paper. I must ask you to go there and tell them
that you have seen with your own eyes Lieutenant Réal sail away on his
mission.”

The stoniness of Peyrol persisted, but his eyes were full of fury. “Oh
yes, I see myself going there. Twenty-five hundred francs! Twenty-five
hundred fiddlesticks.” His tone changed suddenly. “I heard someone say
that you were an honest man, and I suppose this is a proof of it. Well,
to the devil with your honesty.” He glared at the lieutenant, and then
thought: “He doesn’t even pretend to listen to what I say”--and another
sort of anger, partly contemptuous and with something of dim sympathy in
it, replaced his downright fury. “Pah!” he said, spat over the side, and
walking up to Réal with great deliberation, slapped him on the shoulder.
The only effect of this proceeding was to make Réal look up at him
without any expression whatever.

Peyrol then picked up the lieutenant’s valise and carried it down into
the cuddy. As he passed by, Citizen Scevola uttered the word “Citoyen,”
but it was only when he came back again that Peyrol condescended to say
“Well?”

“What are you going to do with me?” asked Scevola.

“You would not give me an account of how you came on board this
tartane,” said Peyrol in a tone that sounded almost friendly, “therefore
I need not tell you what I will do with you.”

A low muttering of thunder followed so close upon his words that it
might have come out of Peyrol’s own lips. The rover gazed uneasily at
the sky. It was still clear overhead, and at the bottom of that little
basin surrounded by rocks there was no view in any other direction; but
even as he gazed there was a sort of flicker in the sunshine, succeeded
by a mighty but distant clap of thunder. For the next half-hour Peyrol
and Michel were busy ashore taking a long line from the tartane to the
entrance of the little basin, where they fastened the end of it to a
bush. This was for the purpose of hauling the tartane out into the
cove. Then they came aboard again. The bit of sky above their heads was
still clear, but while walking with the hauling line near the cove
Peyrol had got a glimpse of the edge of the cloud. The sun grew
scorching all of a sudden, and in the stagnating air a mysterious change
seemed to come over the quality and the colour of the light. Peyrol
flung his cap on the deck, baring his head to the subtle menace of the
breathless stillness of the air.

“Phew! Ca chauffe,” he muttered, rolling up the sleeves of his jacket.
He wiped his forehead with his mighty forearm upon which a mermaid with
an immensely long fishtail was tattooed. Perceiving the lieutenant’s
belted sword lying on the deck, he picked it up and without any ceremony
threw it down the cabin stairs. As he was passing again near Scevola,
the sans-culotte raised his voice.

“I believe you are one of those wretches corrupted by English gold,” he
cried like one inspired. His shining eyes, his red cheeks, testified to
the fire of patriotism burning in his breast, and he used that
conventional phrase of revolutionary time, a time when, intoxicated with
oratory, he used to run about dealing death to traitors of both sexes
and all ages. But his denunciation was received in such profound silence
that his own belief in it wavered. His words had sunk into an abysmal
stillness and the next sound was Peyrol speaking to Réal.

“I am afraid you will get very wet, lieutenant, before long,” and then,
looking at Réal, he thought with great conviction: “Wet! He wouldn’t
mind getting drowned.” Standing stock still, he fretted and fumed
inwardly, wondering where precisely the English ship was by this time
and where the devil that thunderstorm had got to: for the sky had become
as mute as the oppressed earth. Réal asked:

“Is it not time to haul out, gunner?”

And Peyrol said:

“There is not a breath of wind anywhere for miles.” He was gratified by
the fairly loud mutter rolling apparently along the inland hills. Over
the pool a little ragged cloud torn from the purple robe of the storm
floated, arrested and thin like a bit of dark gauze.

Above at the farm Catherine had heard, too, the ominous mutter and came
to the door of the salle. From there she could see the purple cloud
itself, convoluted and solid, and its sinister shadow lying over the
hills. The oncoming of the storm added to her sense of uneasiness at
finding herself all alone in the house. Michel had not come up. She
would have welcomed Michel, to whom she hardly ever spoke, simply as a
person belonging to the usual order of things. She was not talkative,
but somehow she would have liked somebody to speak to just for a moment.
This cessation of all sound, voices or footsteps, around the buildings
was not welcome; but looking at the cloud, she thought that there would
be noise enough presently. However, stepping back into the kitchen, she
was met by a sound that made her regret the oppressive silence, by its
piercing and terrifying character; it was a shriek in the upper part of
the house, where, as far as she knew, there was only Arlette asleep. In
her attempt to cross the kitchen to the foot of the stairs the weight of
her accumulated years fell upon the old woman. She felt suddenly very
feeble and hardly able to breathe. And all at once the thought “Scevola!
Was he murdering her up there?” paralysed the last remnant of her
physical powers. What else could it be? She fell, as if shot, into a
chair under the first shock and found herself unable to move. Only her
brain remained active, and she raised her hands to her eyes as if to
shut out the image of the horrors upstairs. She heard nothing more from
above. Arlette was dead. She thought that now it was her turn. While her
body quailed before the brutal violence, her weary spirit longed
ardently for the end. Let him come! Let all this be over at last, with a
blow on the head or a stab in the breast. She had not the courage to
uncover her eyes. She waited. But after about a minute--it seemed to her
interminable--she heard rapid footsteps overhead. Arlette was running
here and there. Catherine uncovered her eyes and was about to rise when
she heard at the top of the stairs the name of Peyrol shouted with a
desperate accent. Then again, after the shortest of pauses, the cry of
“Peyrol, Peyrol!” and then the sound of feet running downstairs. There
was another shriek, “Peyrol!” just outside the door before it flew open.
Who was pursuing her? Catherine managed to stand up. Steadying herself
with one hand on the table, she presented an undaunted front to her
niece, who ran into the kitchen with loose hair flying and the
appearance of wildest distraction in her eyes.

The staircase door had slammed to behind her. Nobody was pursuing her;
and Catherine, putting forth her lean brown arm, arrested Arlette’s
flight with such a jerk that the two women swung against each other.
She seized her niece by the shoulders.

“What is this, in Heaven’s name? Where are you rushing to?” she cried,
and the other, as if suddenly exhausted, whispered:

“I woke up from an awful dream.”

The kitchen grew dark under the cloud that hung over the house now.
There was a feeble flicker of lightning and a faint crash, far away.

The old woman gave her niece a little shake. “Dreams are nothing,” she
said. “You are awake now....” And indeed Catherine thought that no dream
could be so bad as the realities which kept hold of one through the long
waking hours.

“They were killing him,” moaned Arlette, beginning to tremble and
struggle in her aunt’s arms. “I tell you they were killing him.”

“Be quiet. Were you dreaming of Peyrol?”

She became still in a moment and then whispered: “No, Eugène.”

She had seen Réal set upon by a mob of men and women, all dripping with
blood, in a livid cold light, in front of a stretch of mere shells of
houses with cracked walls and broken windows, and going down in the
midst of a forest of raised arms brandishing sabres, clubs, knives,
axes. There was also a man flourishing a red rag on a stick, while
another was beating a drum which boomed above the sickening sound of
broken glass falling like rain on the pavement. And away round the
corner of an empty street came Peyrol, whom she recognized by his white
head, walking without haste, swinging his cudgel regularly. The terrible
thing was that Peyrol looked straight at her, not noticing anything,
composed, without a frown or a smile, unseeing and deaf, while she waved
her arms and shrieked desperately to him for help. She woke up with the
piercing sound of his name in her ears and with the impression of the
dream so powerful that even now, looking distractedly into her aunt’s
face, she could see the bare arms of that murderous crowd raised above
Réal’s sinking head. Yet the name that had sprung to her lips on waking
was the name of Peyrol. She pushed her aunt away with such force that
the old woman staggered backwards, and to save herself had to catch hold
of the overmantel above her head. Arlette ran to the door of the salle,
looked in, came back to her aunt and shouted: “Where is he?”

Catherine really did not know which path the lieutenant had taken. She
understood very well that “he” meant Réal.

She said: “He went away a long time ago”; grasped her niece’s arm and
added with an effort to steady her voice: “He is coming back,
Arlette--for nothing will keep him away from you.”

Arlette, as if mechanically, was whispering to herself the magic name,
“Peyrol, Peyrol!” then cried: “I want Eugène now. This moment.”

Catherine’s face wore a look of unflinching patience. “He has departed
on service,” she said. Her niece looked at her with enormous eyes,
coal-black, profound, and immovable, while in a forcible and distracted
tone she said: “You and Peyrol have been plotting to rob me of my
reason. But I will know how to make that old man give him up. He is
mine!” She spun round wildly, like a person looking for a way of escape
from a deadly peril, and rushed out blindly.

About Escampobar the air was murky but calm and the silence was so
profound that it was possible to hear the first heavy drops of rain
striking the ground. In the intimidating shadow of the storm-cloud,
Arlette stood irresolute for a moment, but it was to Peyrol, the man of
mystery and power, that her thoughts turned. She was ready to embrace
his knees, to entreat and to scold. “Peyrol, Peyrol!” she cried twice,
and lent her ear as if expecting an answer. Then she shouted: “I want
him back.”

Catherine, alone in the kitchen, moving with dignity, sat down in the
armchair with the tall back, like a senator in his curule chair awaiting
the blow of a barbarous fate.

Arlette flew down the slope. The first sign of her coming was a faint
thin scream which really the rover alone heard and understood. He
pressed his lips in a particular way, showing his appreciation of the
coming difficulty. The next moment he saw, poised on a detached boulder
and thinly veiled by the first perpendicular shower, Arlette, who,
catching sight of the tartane with the men on board of her, let out a
prolonged shriek of mingled triumph and despair: “Peyrol! Help! Pey----rol!”

Réal jumped to his feet with an extremely scared face, but Peyrol
extended an arresting arm. “She is calling to me,” he said, gazing at
the figure poised on the rock. “Well leaped! Sacré nom!... Well leaped!”
And he muttered to himself soberly: “She will break her legs or her
neck.”

“I see you, Peyrol,” screamed Arlette, who seemed to be flying through
the air. “Don’t you dare.”

“Yes, here I am,” shouted the rover, striking his breast with his fist.

Lieutenant Réal put both his hands over his face. Michel looked on
open-mouthed, very much as if watching a performance in a circus; but
Scevola cast his eyes down. Arlette came on board with such an impetus
that Peyrol had to step forward and save her from a fall which would
have stunned her. She struggled in his arms with extreme violence. The
heiress of Escampobar, with her loose black hair, seemed the incarnation
of pale fury. “Misérable! Don’t you dare!” A roll of thunder covered her
voice, but when it had passed away she was heard again in suppliant
tones. “Peyrol, my friend, my dear old friend. Give him back to me,” and
all the time her body writhed in the arms of the old seaman. “You used
to love me, Peyrol,” she cried without ceasing to struggle, and suddenly
struck the rover twice in the face with her clenched fist. Peyrol’s head
received the two blows as if it had been made of marble, but he felt
with fear her body become still, grow rigid in his arms. A heavy squall
enveloped the group of people on board the tartane. Peyrol laid Arlette
gently on the deck. Her eyes were closed, her hands remained clenched;
every sign of life had left her white face. Peyrol stood up and looked
at the tall rocks streaming with water. The rain swept over the tartane
with an angry swishing roar to which was added the sound of water
rushing violently down the folds and seams of the precipitous shore,
vanishing gradually from his sight, as if this had been the beginning of
a destroying and universal deluge--the end of all things.

Lieutenant Réal, kneeling on one knee, contemplated the pale face of
Arlette. Distinct, yet mingling with the faint growl of distant thunder,
Peyrol’s voice was heard saying:

“We can’t put her ashore and leave her lying in the rain. She must be
taken up to the house.” Arlette’s soaked clothes clung to her limbs
while the lieutenant, his bare head dripping with rainwater, looked as
if he had just saved her from drowning. Peyrol gazed down inscrutably at
the woman stretched on the deck and at the kneeling man. “She has
fainted from rage at her old Peyrol,” he went on rather dreamily.
“Strange things do happen. However, lieutenant, you had better take her
under the arms and step ashore first. I will help you. Ready? Lift.”

The movements of the two men had to be careful and their progress was
slow on the lower, steep part of the slope. After going up more than
two-thirds of the way, they rested their insensible burden on a flat
stone. Réal continued to sustain the shoulders, but Peyrol lowered the
feet gently.

“Ha!” he said. “You will be able to carry her yourself the rest of the
way and give her up to old Catherine. Get a firm footing and I will lift
her and place her in your arms. You can walk the distance quite easily.
There.... Hold her a little higher, or her feet will be catching on the
stones.”

Arlette’s hair was hanging far below the lieutenant’s arm in an inert
and heavy mass. The thunderstorm was passing away, leaving a cloudy sky.
And Peyrol thought with a profound sigh: “I am tired.”

“She is light,” said Réal.

“Parbleu, she is light. If she were dead you would find her heavy
enough. Allons, mon lieutenant. No! I am not coming. What’s the good?
I’ll stay down here. I have no mind to listen to Catherine’s scolding.”

The lieutenant, looking absorbed into the face resting in the hollow of
his arm, never averted his gaze--not even when Peyrol, stooping over
Arlette, kissed the white forehead near the roots of the hair, black as
a raven’s wing.

“What am I to do?” muttered Réal.

“Do? Why, give her up to old Catherine. And you may just as well tell
her that I will be coming along directly. That will cheer her up. I used
to count for something in that house. Allez! For our time is very
short.”

With these words he turned away and walked slowly down to the tartane. A
breeze had sprung up. He felt it on his wet neck and was grateful for
the cool touch which recalled him to himself, to his old wandering self
which had known no softness and no hesitation in the face of any risk
offered by life.

As he stepped on board, the shower passed away, Michel, wet to the skin,
was still in the very same attitude gazing up the slope. Citizen Scevola
had drawn his knees up and was holding his head in his hands; whether
because of rain or cold or for some other reason, his teeth were
chattering audibly with a continuous and distressing rattle. Peyrol
flung off his jacket, heavy with water, with a strange air as if it was
of no more use to his mortal envelope, squared his broad shoulders, and
directed Michel, in a deep, quiet voice, to let go the lines holding the
tartane to the shore. The faithful henchman was taken aback and required
one of Peyrol’s authoritative “Allez!” to put him in motion. Meantime
the rover cast off the tiller lines and laid his hand with an air of
mastery on the stout piece of wood projecting horizontally from the
rudder-head about the level of his hip. The voices and the movements of
his companions caused Citizen Scevola to master the desperate trembling
of his jaw. He wriggled a little in his bonds, and the question that had
been on his lips for a good many hours was uttered again.

“What are you going to do with me?”

“What do you think of a little promenade at sea?” Peyrol asked in a tone
that was not unkindly.

Citizen Scevola, who had seemed totally and completely cast down and
subdued, let out a most unexpected screech.

“Unbind me. Put me ashore.”

Michel, busy forward, was moved to smile as though he had possessed a
cultivated sense of incongruity. Peyrol remained serious.

“You shall be untied presently,” he assured the blood-drinking patriot,
who had been for so many years the reputed possessor not only of
Escampobar but of the Escampobar heiress that, living on appearances, he
had almost come to believe in that ownership himself. No wonder he
screeched at this rude awakening. Peyrol raised his voice: “Haul on the
line, Michel.”

As, directly the ropes had been let go, the tartane had swung clear of
the shore, the movement given her by Michel carried her towards the
entrance by which the basin communicated with the cove. Peyrol attended
to the helm, and in a moment, gliding through the narrow gap, the
tartane carrying her way, shot out almost into the middle of the cove.

A little wind could be felt, running light wrinkles over the water, but
outside the overshadowed sea was already speckled with white caps.
Peyrol helped Michel to haul aft the sheets and then went back to the
tiller. The pretty spick-and-span craft that had been lying idle for so
long began to glide into the wide world. Michel gazed at the shore as if
lost in admiration. Citizen Scevola’s head had fallen on his knees while
his nerveless hands clasped his legs loosely. He was the very image of
dejection.

“Hé, Michel! Come here and cast loose the citizen. It is only fair that
he should be untied for a little excursion at sea.”

When his order had been executed, Peyrol addressed himself to the
desolate figure on the deck.

“Like this, should the tartane get capsized in a squall, you will have
an equal chance with us to swim for your life.”

Scevola disdained to answer. He was engaged in biting his knee with rage
in a stealthy fashion.

“You came on board for some murderous purpose. Who you were after,
unless it was myself, God only knows. I feel quite justified in giving
you a little outing at sea. I won’t conceal from you, citizen, that it
may not be without risk to life or limb. But you have only yourself to
thank for being here.”

As the tartane drew clear of the cove, she felt more the weight of the
breeze and darted forward with a lively motion. A vaguely contented
smile lighted up Michel’s hairy countenance.

“She feels the sea,” said Peyrol, who enjoyed the swift movement of his
vessel. “This is different from your lagoon, Michel.”

“To be sure,” said Michel with becoming gravity.

“Doesn’t it seem funny to you, as you look back at the shore, to think
that you have left nothing and nobody behind?”

Michel assumed the aspect of a man confronted by an intellectual
problem. Since he had become Peyrol’s henchman he had lost the habit of
thinking altogether. Directions and orders were easy things to
apprehend; but a conversation with him whom he called “notre maître” was
a serious matter demanding great and concentrated attention.

“Possibly,” he murmured, looking strangely selfconscious.

“Well, you are lucky, take my word for it,” said the rover, watching the
course of his little vessel along the head of the peninsula. “You have
not even a dog to miss you.”

“I have only you, Maître Peyrol.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” said Peyrol half to himself, while Michel,
who had good sea-legs, kept his balance to the movements of the craft
without taking his eyes from the rover’s face.

“No,” Peyrol exclaimed suddenly, after a moment of meditation, “I could
not leave you behind.” He extended his open palm towards Michel.

“Put your hand in there,” he said.

Michel hesitated for a moment before this extraordinary proposal. At
last he did so, and Peyrol, holding the bereaved fisherman’s hand in a
powerful grip, said:

“If I had gone away by myself, I would have left you marooned on this
earth like a man thrown out to die on a desert island.” Some dim
perception of the solemnity of the occasion seemed to enter Michel’s
primitive brain. He connected Peyrol’s words with the sense of his own
insignificant position at the tail of all mankind, and, timidly, he
murmured with his clear, innocent glance unclouded, the fundamental
axiom of his philosophy:

“Somebody must be last in this world.”

“Well, then, you will have to forgive me all that may happen between
this and the hour of sunset.”

The tartane, obeying the helm, fell off before the wind, with her head
to the eastward.

Peyrol murmured: “She has not forgotten how to walk the seas.” His
unsubdued heart, heavy for so many days, had a moment of buoyancy--the
illusion of immense freedom.

At that moment Réal, amazed at finding no tartane in the basin, was
running madly towards the cove, where he was sure Peyrol must be waiting
to give her up to him. He ran out on to the very rock on which Peyrol’s
late prisoner had sat after his escape, too tired to care, yet cheered
by the hope of liberty. But Réal was in a worse plight. He could see no
shadowy form through the thin veil of rain which pitted the sheltered
piece of water framed in the rocks. The little craft had been spirited
away. Impossible! There must be something wrong with his eyes! Again the
barren hillsides echoed the name of “Peyrol,” shouted with all the force
of Réal’s lungs. He shouted it only once, and about five minutes
afterwards appeared at the kitchen door, panting, streaming with water
as if he had fought his way up from the bottom of the sea. In the
tall-backed armchair Arlette lay, with her limbs relaxed, her head on
Catherine’s arm, her face white as death. He saw her open her black
eyes, enormous and as if not of this world; he saw old Catherine turn
her head, heard a cry of surprise, and saw a sort of struggle beginning
between the two women. He screamed at them like a madman: “Peyrol has
betrayed me!” and in an instant, with a bang of the door, he was gone.

The rain had ceased. Above his head the unbroken mass of clouds moved to
the eastward, and he moved in the same direction, as if he too were
driven by the wind up the hillside, towards the lookout. When he reached
the spot and, gasping, flung one arm round the trunk of the leaning
tree, the only thing he was aware of during the sombre pause in the
unrest of the elements was the distracting turmoil of his thoughts.
After a moment he perceived through the rain the English ship with her
topsails lowered on the caps, forging ahead slowly across the northern
entrance of the Petite Passe. His distress fastened insanely on the
notion of there being a connection between that enemy ship and Peyrol’s
inexplicable conduct. That old man had always meant to go himself! And
when a moment after, looking to the southward, he made out the shadow of
the tartane coming round the land in the midst of another squall, he
muttered to himself a bitter “Of course!” She had both her sails set.
Peyrol was indeed pressing her to the utmost in his shameful haste to
traffic with the enemy. The truth was that from the position in which
Réal first saw him, Peyrol could not yet see the English ship, and held
confidently on his course up the middle of the strait. The man-of-war
and the little tartane saw each other quite unexpectedly at a distance
that was very little over a mile. Peyrol’s heart flew into his mouth at
finding himself so close to the enemy. On board the _Amelia_ at first
no notice was taken. It was simply a tartane making for shelter on the
north side of Porquerolles. But when Peyrol suddenly altered his course,
the master of the man-of-war noticing the manœuvre, took up the long
glass for a look. Captain Vincent was on deck and agreed with the
master’s remark that “there was a craft acting suspiciously.” Before the
_Amelia_ could come round in the heavy squall, Peyrol was already under
the battery of Porquerolles and, so far, safe from capture. Captain
Vincent had no mind to bring his ship within reach of the battery and
risk damage in his rigging or hull for the sake of a small coaster.
However, the tale brought on board by Symons of his discovery of a
hidden craft, of his capture, and his wonderful escape, had made every
tartane an object of interest to the whole ship’s company. The _Amelia_
remained hove to in the strait while her officers watched the lateen
sails gliding to and fro under the protecting muzzles of the guns.
Captain Vincent himself had been impressed by Peyrol’s manœuvre.
Coasting craft, as a rule, were not afraid of the _Amelia_. After taking
a few turns on the quarter-deck he ordered Symons to be called aft.

The hero of a unique and mysterious adventure, which had been the only
subject of talk on board the corvette for the last twenty-four hours,
came along rolling, hat in hand, and enjoying a secret sense of his
importance.

“Take the glass,” said the captain, “and have a look at that vessel
under the land. Is she anything like the tartane that you say you have
been aboard of?”

Symons was very positive. “I think I can swear to those painted
mastheads, your honour. It is the last thing I remember before that
murderous ruffian knocked me senseless. The moon shone on them. I can
make them out now with the glass.” As to the fellow boasting to him that
the tartane was a dispatch-boat and had already made some trips, well,
Symons begged his honour to believe that the beggar was not sober at the
time. He did not care what he blurted out. The best proof of his
condition was that he went away to fetch the soldiers and forgot to come
back. The murderous old ruffian! “You see, you honour,” continued
Symons, “he thought I was not likely to escape after getting a blow that
would have killed nine out of any ten men. So he went away to boast of
what he had done before the people ashore; because one of his chums,
worse than himself, came down thinking he would kill me with a dam’ big
manure fork, saving your honour’s presence. A regular savage he was.”

Symons paused, staring, as if astonished at the marvels of his own tale.
The old master, standing at his captain’s elbow, observed in a
dispassionate tone that, anyway, that peninsula was not a bad
jumping-off place for a craft intending to slip through the blockade.
Symons, not being dismissed, waited, hat in hand, while Captain Vincent
directed the master to fill on the ship and stand a little nearer to the
battery. It was done, and presently there was a flash of a gun low down
on the water’s edge and a shot came skipping in the direction of the
_Amelia_. It fell very short, but Captain Vincent judged the ship was
close enough, and ordered her to be hove to again. Then Symons was told
to take a look through the glass once more. After a long interval he
lowered it and spoke impressively to his captain:

“I can make out three heads aboard, your honour, and one is white. I
would swear to that white head anywhere.”

Captain Vincent made no answer. All this seemed very odd to him; but
after all it was possible. The craft had certainly acted suspiciously.
He spoke to the first lieutenant in a half-vexed tone.

“He has done a rather smart thing. He will dodge here till dark and then
get away. It is perfectly absurd. I don’t want to send the boats too
close to the battery. And if I do he may simply sail away from them and
be round the land long before we are ready to give him chase. Darkness
will be his best friend. However, we will keep a watch on him in case he
is tempted to give us the slip late in the afternoon. In that case we
will have a good try to catch him. If he has anything aboard, I should
like to get hold of it. It may be of some importance, after all.”

On board the tartane Peyrol put his own interpretation on the ship’s
movements. His object had been attained. The corvette had marked him for
her prey. Satisfied as to that, Peyrol watched his opportunity and
taking advantage of a long squall, with rain thick enough to blur the
form of the English ship, he left the shelter of the battery to lead the
Englishman a dance and keep up his character of a man anxious to avoid
capture.

Réal, from his position on the lookout, saw in the thinning downpour
the pointed lateen sails glide round the north end of Porquerolles and
vanish behind the land. Some time afterwards the _Amelia_ made sail in a
manner that put it beyond doubt that she meant to chase. Her lofty
canvas was shut off too presently by the land of Porquerolles. When she
had disappeared Réal turned to Arlette.

“Let us go,” he said.

Arlette, stimulated by the short glimpse of Réal at the kitchen door,
whom she had taken for a vision of a lost man calling her to follow him
to the end of the world, had torn herself out of the old woman’s thin,
bony arms which could not cope with the struggles of her body and the
fierceness of her spirit. She had run straight to the lookout, though
there was nothing to guide her there except a blind impulse to seek Réal
wherever he might be. He was not aware of her having found him until she
seized hold of his arm with a suddenness, energy and determination of
which no one with a clouded mind could have been capable. He felt
himself being taken possession of in a way that tore all his scruples
out of his breast. Holding on to the trunk of the tree, he threw his
other arm round her waist, and when she confessed to him that she did
not know why she had run up there, but that if she had not found him she
would have thrown herself over the cliff, he tightened his clasp with
sudden exultation, as though she had been a gift prayed for instead of a
stumbling-block for his pedantic conscience. Together they walked back.
In the failing light the buildings awaited them, lifeless, the walls
darkened by rain and the big slopes of the roofs glistening and sinister
under the flying desolation of the clouds. In the kitchen Catherine
heard their mingled footsteps, and rigid in the tall arm-chair awaited
their coming. Arlette threw her arms round the old woman’s neck, while
Réal stood on one side, looking on. Thought after thought flew through
his mind and vanished in the strong feeling of the irrevocable nature of
the event handing him to the woman whom, in the revulsion of his
feelings, he was inclined to think more sane than himself. Arlette, with
one arm over the old woman’s shoulders, kissed the wrinkled forehead
under the white band of linen that, on the erect head, had the effect of
a rustic diadem.

“To-morrow you and I will have to walk down to the church.”

The austere dignity of Catherine’s pose seemed to be shaken by this
proposal to lead before the God with whom she had made her peace long
ago that unhappy girl chosen to share in the guilt of impious and
unspeakable horrors which had darkened her mind.

Arlette, still stooping over her aunt’s face, extended a hand towards
Réal, who, making a step forward, took it silently into his grasp.

“Oh yes, you will, Aunt,” insisted Arlette. “You will have to come with
me to pray for Peyrol, whom you and I shall never see any more.”

Catherine’s head dropped, whether in assent or grief; and Réal felt an
unexpected and profound emotion, for he, too, was convinced that none of
the three persons in the farm would ever see Peyrol again. It was as
though the rover of the wide seas had left them to themselves on a
sudden impulse of scorn, of magnanimity, of a passion weary of itself.
However come by, Réal was ready to clasp for ever to his breast that
woman touched by the red hand of the Revolution; for she, whose little
feet had run ankle-deep through the terrors of death, had brought to him
the sense of triumphant life.




XVI


Astern of the tartane, the sun, about to set, kindled a streak of dull
crimson glow between the darkening sea and the overcast sky. The
peninsula of Giens and the islands of Hyères formed one mass of land
detaching itself very black against the fiery girdle of the horizon; but
to the north the long stretch of the Alpine coast continued beyond sight
its endless sinuosities under the stooping clouds.

The tartane seemed to be rushing together with the run of the waves into
the arms of the oncoming night. A little more than a mile away on her
lee quarter, the _Amelia_, under all plain sail, pressed to the end of
the chase. It had lasted now for a good many hours, for Peyrol, when
slipping away, had managed to get the advantage of the _Amelia_ from the
very start. While still within the large sheet of smooth water which is
called the Hyères Roadstead, the tartane, which was really a craft of
extraordinary speed, managed to gain positively on the sloop.
Afterwards, by suddenly darting down the eastern passage between the two
last islands of the group, Peyrol actually got out of sight of the
chasing ship, being hidden by the Ile du Levant for a time. The
_Amelia_, having to tack twice in order to follow, lost ground once
more. Emerging into the open sea, she had to tack again, and then the
position became that of a stern chase, which proverbially is known as a
long chase. Peyrol’s skilful seamanship had twice extracted from Captain
Vincent a low murmur accompanied by a significant compression of lips.
At one time the _Amelia_ had been near enough the tartane to send a shot
ahead of her. That one was followed by another, which whizzed
extraordinarily close to the mastheads, but then Captain Vincent ordered
the gun to be secured again. He said to his first lieutenant, who, his
speaking-trumpet in hand, kept at his elbow: “We must not sink that
craft on any account. If we could get only an hour’s calm, we would
carry her with the boats.”

The lieutenant remarked that there was no hope of a calm for the next
twenty-four hours at least.

“No,” said Captain Vincent, “and in about an hour it will be dark, and
then he may very well give us the slip. The coast is not very far off
and there are batteries on both sides of Fréjus, under any of which he
will be as safe from capture as though he were hove up on the beach. And
look,” he exclaimed after a moment’s pause, “this is what the fellow
means to do.”

“Yes, sir,” said the lieutenant, keeping his eyes on the white speck
ahead, dancing lightly on the short Mediterranean waves, “he is keeping
off the wind.”

“We will have him in less than an hour,” said Captain Vincent, and made
as if he meant to rub his hands, but suddenly leaned his elbow on the
rail. “After all,” he went on, “properly speaking, it is a race between
the _Amelia_ and the night.”

“And it will be dark early to-day,” said the first lieutenant, swinging
the speaking-trumpet by its lanyard. “Shall we take the yards off the
backstays, sir?”

“No,” said Captain Vincent. “There is a clever seaman aboard that
tartane. He is running off now, but at any time he may haul up again. We
must not follow him too closely, or we shall lose the advantage which we
have now. That man is determined on making his escape.”

If those words by some miracle could have been carried to the ears of
Peyrol, they would have brought to his lips a smile of malicious and
triumphant exultation. Ever since he had laid his hand on the tiller of
the tartane every faculty of his resourcefulness and seamanship had been
bent on deceiving the English captain, that enemy whom he had never
seen, the man whose mind he had constructed for himself from the
evolutions of his ship. Leaning against the heavy tiller he addressed
Michel, breaking the silence of the strenuous afternoon.

“This is the moment,” his deep voice uttered quietly. “Ease off the
mainsheet, Michel. A little now, only.”

When Michel returned to the place where he had been sitting to windward,
the rover noticed his eyes fixed on his face wonderingly. Some vague
thoughts had been forming themselves slowly, incompletely, in Michel’s
brain. Peyrol met the utter innocence of the unspoken inquiry with a
smile that, beginning sardonically on his manly and sensitive mouth,
ended in something resembling tenderness.

“That’s so, camarade,” he said with particular stress and intonation, as
if those words contained a full and sufficient answer. Most unexpectedly
Michel’s round and generally staring eyes blinked, as if dazzled. He too
produced from somewhere in the depths of his being a queer, misty smile
from which Peyrol averted his gaze.

“Where is the citizen?” he asked, bearing hard against the tiller and
staring straight ahead. “He isn’t gone overboard, is he? I don’t seem to
have seen him since we rounded the land near Porquerolles Castle.”

Michel, after craning his head forward to look over the edge of the
deck, announced that Scevola was sitting on the keelson.

“Go forward,” said Peyrol, “and ease off the foresheet now a little.
This tartane has wings,” he added to himself.

Alone on the after-deck Peyrol turned his head to look at the _Amelia_.
That ship, in consequence of holding her wind, was now crossing
obliquely the wake of the tartane. At the same time she had diminished
the distance. Nevertheless, Peyrol considered that had he really meant
to escape, his chances were as eight to ten--practically an assured
success. For a long time he had been contemplating the lofty pyramid of
canvas towering against the fading red belt on the sky, when a
lamentable groan made him look round. It was Scevola. The citizen had
adopted the mode of progression on all fours, and while Peyrol looked at
him he rolled to leeward, saved himself rather cleverly from going
overboard, and holding on desperately to a cleat, shouted in a hollow
voice, pointing with the other hand as if he had made a tremendous
discovery: “La terre! La terre!”

“Certainly,” said Peyrol, steering with extreme nicety. “What of that?”

“I don’t want to be drowned!” cried the citizen in his new hollow
voice. Peyrol reflected a bit before he spoke in a serious tone:

“If you stay where you are, I assure you that you will ...” he glanced
rapidly over his shoulder at the _Amelia_ ... “not die by drowning.” He
jerked his head sideways. “I know that man’s mind.”

“What man? Whose mind?” yelled Scevola with intense eagerness and
bewilderment. “We are only three on board.”

But Peyrol’s mind was contemplating maliciously the figure of a man with
long teeth, in a wig and with large buckles to his shoes. Such was his
ideal conception of what the captain of the _Amelia_ ought to look like.
That officer, whose naturally good-humoured face wore then a look of
severe resolution, had beckoned his first lieutenant to his side again.

“We are gaining,” he said quietly. “I intend to close with him to
windward. We won’t risk any of his tricks. It is very difficult to
outmanœuvre a Frenchman, as you know. Send a few armed marines on the
forecastle ahead. I am afraid the only way to get hold of this tartane
is to disable the men on board of her. I wish to goodness I could think
of some other. When we close with her, let the marines fire a well-aimed
volley. You must get some marines to stand by aft as well. I hope we may
shoot away his halliards; once his sails are down on his deck he is ours
for the trouble of putting a boat over the side.”

For more than half an hour Captain Vincent stood silent, elbow on rail,
keeping his eye on the tartane, while on board the latter Peyrol steered
silent and watchful but intensely conscious of the enemy ship holding on
in her relentless pursuit. The narrow red band was dying out of the
sky. The French coast, black against the fading light, merged into the
shadows gathering in the eastern board. Citizen Scevola, somewhat
soothed by the assurance that he would not die by drowning, had elected
to remain quiet where he had fallen, not daring to trust himself to move
on the lively deck. Michel, squatting to windward, gazed intently at
Peyrol in expectation of some order at any minute. But Peyrol uttered no
word and made no sign. From time to time a burst of foam flew over the
tartane, or a splash of water would come aboard with a scurrying noise.

It was not till the corvette had got within a long gunshot from the
tartane that Peyrol opened his mouth.

“No!” he burst out, loud in the wind, as if giving vent to long anxious
thinking, “no! I could not have left you behind with not even a dog for
company. Devil take me if I don’t think you would not have thanked me
for it either. What do you say to that, Michel?”

A half-puzzled smile dwelt persistently on the guileless countenance of
the ex-fisherman. He stated what he had always thought in respect of
Peyrol’s every remark: “I think you are right, maître.”

“Listen then, Michel. That ship will be alongside of us in less than
half an hour. As she comes up they will open on us with musketry.”

“They will open on us ...” repeated Michel, looking quite interested.
“But how do you know they will do that, maître?”

“Because her captain has got to obey what is in my mind,” said Peyrol,
in a tone of positive and solemn conviction. “He will do it as sure as
if I were at his ear telling him what to do. He will do it because he is
a first-rate seaman, but I, Michel, I am just a little bit cleverer than
he.” He glanced over his shoulder at the _Amelia_ rushing after the
tartane with swelling sails, and raised his voice suddenly. “He will do
it because no more than half a mile ahead of us is the spot where Peyrol
will die!”

Michel did not start. He only shut his eyes for a time, and the rover
continued in a lower tone:

“I may be shot through the heart at once,” he said; “and in that case
you have my permission to let go the halliards if you are alive
yourself. But if I live I mean to put the helm down. When I do that you
will let go the foresheet to help the tartane to fly into the wind’s
eye. This is my last order to you. Now go forward and fear nothing.
Adieu.” Michel obeyed without a word.

Half a dozen of the _Amelia’s_ marines stood ranged on the
forecastle-head ready with their muskets. Captain Vincent walked into
the lee waist to watch his chase. When he thought that the jibboom of
the _Amelia_ had drawn level with the stern of the tartane he waved his
hat and the marines discharged their muskets. Apparently no gear was
cut. Captain Vincent observed the white-headed man, who was steering,
clap his hand to his left side, while he hove the tiller to leeward and
brought the tartane sharply into the wind. The marines on the poop fired
in their turn, all the reports merging into one. Voices were heard on
the decks crying that they “had hit the white-haired chap.” Captain
Vincent shouted to the master:

“Get the ship round on the other tack.”

The elderly seaman who was the master of the _Amelia_ took a critical
look before he gave the necessary orders; and the _Amelia_ closed on her
chase with her decks resounding to the piping of boatswain’s mates and
the hoarse shout: “Hands shorten sail. About ship.”

Peyrol, lying on his back under the swinging tiller, heard the calls
shrilling and dying away; he heard the ominous rush of the _Amelia’s_
bow wave as the sloop foamed within ten yards of the tartane’s stern; he
even saw her upper yards coming down, and then everything vanished out
of the clouded sky. There was nothing in his ears but the sound of the
wind, the wash of the waves buffeting the little craft left without
guidance, and the continuous thrashing of its foresail the sheet of
which Michel had let go according to orders. The tartane began to roll
heavily, but Peyrol’s right arm was sound and he managed to put it round
a bollard to prevent himself from being flung about. A feeling of peace
sank into him, not unmingled with pride. Everything he had planned had
come to pass. He had meant to play that man a trick, and now the trick
had been played. Played by him better than by any other old man on whom
age had stolen, unnoticed, till the veil of peace was torn down by the
touch of a sentiment unexpected like an intruder and cruel like an
enemy.

Peyrol rolled his head to the left. All he could see were the legs of
Citizen Scevola sliding nervelessly to and fro to the rolling of the
vessel as if his body had been jammed somewhere. Dead, or only scared to
death? And Michel? Was he dead or dying, that man without friends whom
his pity had refused to leave behind marooned on the earth without even
a dog for company. As to that, Peyrol felt no compunction; but he
thought he would have liked to see Michel once more. He tried to utter
his name, but his throat refused him even a whisper. He felt himself
removed far away from that world of human sounds, in which Arlette had
screamed at him: “Peyrol, don’t you dare!” He would never hear anybody’s
voice again! Under that grey sky there was nothing for him but the swish
of breaking seas and the ceaseless furious beating of the tartane’s
foresail. His plaything was knocking about terribly under him, with her
tiller flying madly to and fro just clear of his head, and solid lumps
of water coming on board over his prostrate body. Suddenly, in a
desperate lurch which brought the whole Mediterranean with a ferocious
snarl level with the slope of the little deck, Peyrol saw the _Amelia_
bearing right down upon the tartane. The fear, not of death, but of
failure, gripped his slowing-down heart. Was this blind Englishman going
to run him down and sink the dispatches together with the craft? With a
mighty effort of his ebbing strength Peyrol sat up and flung his arm
round the shroud of the mainmast.

The _Amelia_, whose way had carried her past the tartane for a quarter
of a mile before sail could be shortened and her yards swung on the
other tack, was coming back to take possession of her chase. In the
deepening dusk and amongst the foaming seas it was a matter of
difficulty to make out the little craft. At the very moment when the
master of the man-of-war, looking out anxiously from the
forecastle-head, thought that she might perhaps have filled and gone
down, he caught sight of her rolling in the trough of the sea, and so
close that she seemed to be at the end of the _Amelia’s_ jibboom. His
heart flew in his mouth. “Hard a starboard!” he yelled, his order being
passed along the decks.

Peyrol, sinking back on the deck, in another heavy lurch of his craft,
saw for an instant the whole of the English corvette swing up into the
clouds as if she meant to fling herself upon his very breast. A blown
seatop flicked his face noisily, followed by a smooth interval, a
silence of the waters. He beheld in a flash the days of his manhood, of
strength and adventure. Suddenly an enormous voice like the roar of an
angry sea-lion seemed to fill the whole of the empty sky in a mighty and
commanding shout: “Steady!”... And with the sound of that familiar
English word ringing in his ears Peyrol smiled to his visions and died.

The _Amelia_, stripped down to her topsails and hove to, rose and fell
easily, while on her quarter about a cable’s length away Peyrol’s
tartane tumbled like a lifeless corpse amongst the seas. Captain
Vincent, in his favourite attitude of leaning over the rail, kept his
eyes fastened on his prize. Mr. Bolt, who had been sent for, waited
patiently till his commander turned round.

“Oh, here you are, Mr. Bolt. I have sent for you to go and take
possession. You speak French, and there may still be somebody alive in
her. If so, of course you will send him on board at once. I am sure
there can be nobody unwounded there. It will anyhow be too dark to see
much, but just have a good look round and secure everything in the way
of papers you can lay your hands on. Haul aft the foresheet and sail her
up to receive a tow-line. I intend to take her along and ransack her
thoroughly in the morning; tear down the cuddy linings and so on,
should you not find at once what I expect....” Captain Vincent, his
white teeth gleaming in the dusk, gave some further orders in a lower
tone, and Mr. Bolt departed in a hurry. Half an hour afterwards he was
back on board, and the _Amelia_, with the tartane in tow, made sail to
the eastward in search of the blockading fleet.

Mr. Bolt, introduced into a cabin strongly lighted by a swinging lamp,
tendered to his captain across the table a sail-cloth package corded and
sealed, and a piece of paper folded in four, which, he explained, seemed
to be a certificate of registry, strangely enough mentioning no name.
Captain Vincent seized the grey canvas package eagerly.

“This looks like the very thing, Bolt,” he said, turning it over in his
hands. “What else did you find on board?”

Bolt said that he had found three dead men, two on the after-deck and
one lying at the bottom of the open hold with the bare end of the
foresheet in his hand--“shot down, I suppose, just as he had let it go,”
he commented. He described the appearance of the bodies and reported
that he had disposed of them according to orders. In the tartane’s cabin
there was half a demijohn of wine and a loaf of bread in a locker; also,
on the floor, a leather valise containing an officer’s uniform coat and
a change of clothing. He had lighted the lamp and saw that the linen was
marked “E. Réal.” An officer’s sword on a broad shoulder-belt was also
lying on the floor. These things could not have belonged to the old chap
with the white hair, who was a big man. “Looks as if somebody had
tumbled overboard,” commented Bolt. Two of the bodies looked
nondescript, but there was no doubt about that fine old fellow being a
seaman.

“By heavens!” said Captain Vincent, “he was that! Do you know, Bolt,
that he nearly managed to escape us. Another twenty minutes would have
done it. How many wounds had he?”

“Three I think, sir. I did not look closely,” said Bolt.

“I hated the necessity of shooting brave men like dogs,” said Captain
Vincent. “Still, it was the only way; and there may be something here,”
he went on, slapping the package with his open palm, “that will justify
me in my own eyes. You may go now.”

Captain Vincent did not turn in, but only lay down fully dressed on the
couch till the officer of the watch, appearing at the door, told him
that a ship of the fleet was in sight away to windward. Captain Vincent
ordered the private night signal to be made. When he came on deck the
towering shadow of a line-of-battle ship that seemed to reach to the
very clouds was well within hail and a voice bellowed from her through a
speaking-trumpet:

“What ship is that?”

“His Majesty’s sloop _Amelia_,” hailed back Captain Vincent. “What ship
is that, pray?”

Instead of the usual answer, there was a short pause, and another voice
spoke boisterously through the trumpet:

“Is that you, Vincent? Don’t you know the _Superb_ when you see her?”

“Not in the dark, Keats. How are you? I am in a hurry to speak the
Admiral.”

“The fleet is lying by,” came the voice, now with painstaking
distinctness, across the murmurs, whispers and splashes of the black
lane of water dividing the two ships. “The Admiral bears S.S.E. If you
stretch on till daylight as you are, you will fetch him on the other
tack in time for breakfast on board the _Victory_. Is anything up?”

At every slight roll the sails of the _Amelia_, becalmed by the bulk of
the seventy-four, flapped gently against the masts.

“Not much,” hailed Captain Vincent. “I made a prize.”

“Have you been in action?” came the swift inquiry.

“No, no. Piece of luck.”

“Where’s your prize?” roared the speaking-trumpet with interest.

“In my desk,” roared Captain Vincent in reply.... “Enemy dispatches....
I say, Keats, fill on your ship. Fill on her, I say, or you will be
falling on board of me.” He stamped his foot impatiently. “Clap some
hands at once on the tow-line and run that tartane close under our
stern,” he called to the officer of the watch, “or else the old _Superb_
will walk over her without ever knowing anything about it.”

When Captain Vincent presented himself on board the _Victory_ it was too
late for him to be invited to share the Admiral’s breakfast. He was told
that Lord Nelson had not been seen on deck yet that morning; and
presently word came that he wished to see Captain Vincent at once in his
cabin. Being introduced, the captain of the _Amelia_, in undress
uniform, with a sword by his side and his hat under his arm, was
received kindly, made his bow and with a few words of explanation laid
the packet on the big round table at which sat a silent secretary in
black clothes, who had been obviously writing a letter from his
Lordship’s dictation. The Admiral had been walking up and down, and
after he had greeted Captain Vincent he resumed his pacing of a nervous
man. His empty sleeve had not yet been pinned on his breast, and swung
slightly every time he turned in his walk. His thin locks fell lank
against the pale cheeks, and the whole face in repose had an expression
of suffering with which the fire of his one eye presented a startling
contrast. He stopped short and exclaimed while Captain Vincent towered
over him in a respectful attitude:

“A tartane! Captured on board a tartane! How on earth did you pitch upon
that one out of the hundreds you must see every month?”

“I must confess that I got hold accidentally of some curious
information,” said Captain Vincent. “It was all a piece of luck.”

While the secretary was ripping open with a penknife the cover of the
dispatches Lord Nelson took Captain Vincent out into the stern gallery.
The quiet and sunshiny morning had the added charm of a cool, light
breeze; and the _Victory_, under her three topsails and lower staysails,
was moving slowly to the southward in the midst of the scattered fleet
carrying for the most part the same sail as the Admiral. Only far away
two or three ships could be seen covered with canvas, trying to close
with the flag. Captain Vincent noted with satisfaction that the first
lieutenant of the _Amelia_ had been obliged to brace by his afteryards
in order not to overrun the Admiral’s quarter.

“Why!” exclaimed Lord Nelson suddenly, after looking at the sloop for a
moment, “you have that tartane in tow!”

“I thought that your Lordship would perhaps like to see a 40-ton lateen
craft which has led such a chase to, I dare say, the fastest sloop in
His Majesty’s service.”

“How did it all begin?” asked the Admiral, continuing to look at the
_Amelia_.

“As I have already hinted to your Lordship, certain information came in
my way,” began Captain Vincent, who did not think it necessary to
enlarge upon that part of the story. “This tartane, which is not very
different to look at from the other tartanes along the coast between
Cette and Genoa, had started from a cove on the Giens peninsula. An old
man with a white head of hair was entrusted with the service, and really
they could have found nobody better. He came round Cape Esterel
intending to pass through the Hyères Roadstead. Apparently he did not
expect to find the _Amelia_ in his way. And it was there that he made
his only mistake. If he had kept on his course, I would probably have
taken no more notice of him than of two other craft that were in sight
then. But he acted suspiciously by hauling up for the battery on
Porquerolles. This manœuvre in connection with the information of which
I spoke decided me to overhaul him and see what he had on board.”
Captain Vincent then related concisely the episodes of the chase. “I
assure your Lordship that I never gave an order with greater reluctance
than to open musketry fire on that craft; but the old man had given such
proofs of his seamanship and determination that there was nothing else
for it. Why! at the very moment he had the _Amelia_ alongside of him he
still made a most clever attempt to prolong the chase. There were only
a few minutes of daylight left, and in the darkness we might very well
have lost him. Considering that they all could have saved their lives
simply by striking their sails on deck, I cannot refuse them my
admiration, and especially to the white-haired man.”

The Admiral, who had been all the time looking absently at the _Amelia_
keeping her station with the tartane in tow, said:

“You have a very smart little ship, Vincent. Very fit for the work I
have given you to do. French built, isn’t she?”

“Yes, my Lord. They are great shipbuilders.”

“You don’t seem to hate the French, Vincent,” said the Admiral, smiling
faintly.

“Not that kind, my Lord,” said Captain Vincent, with a bow. “I detest
their political principles and the characters of their public men, but
your Lordship will admit that for courage and determination we could not
have found worthier adversaries anywhere on this globe.”

“I never said that they were to be despised,” said Lord Nelson.
“Resource, courage, yes.... If that Toulon fleet gives me the slip, all
our squadrons from Gibraltar to Brest will be in jeopardy. Why don’t
they come out and be done with it? Don’t I keep far enough out of their
way?” he cried.

Vincent remarked the nervous agitation of the frail figure with a
concern augmented by a fit of coughing which came on the Admiral. He was
quite alarmed by its violence. He watched the Commander-in-Chief in the
Mediterranean choking and gasping so helplessly that he felt compelled
to turn his eyes away from the painful spectacle; but he noticed also
how quickly Lord Nelson recovered from the subsequent exhaustion.

“This is anxious work, Vincent,” he said. “It is killing me. I aspire to
repose somewhere in the country, in the midst of fields, out of reach of
the sea and the Admiralty and dispatches and orders, and responsibility
too. I have been just finishing a letter to tell them at home I have
hardly enough breath in my body to carry me on from day to day.... But I
am like that white-headed man you admire so much, Vincent,” he pursued,
with a weary smile, “I will stick to my task till perhaps some shot from
the enemy puts an end to everything.... Let us see what there may be in
those papers you have brought on board.”

The secretary in the cabin had arranged them in separate piles.

“What is it all about?” asked the Admiral, beginning again to pace
restlessly up and down the cabin.

“At the first glance, the most important, my Lord, are the orders for
marine authorities in Corsica and Naples to make certain dispositions in
view of an expedition to Egypt.”

“I always thought so,” said the Admiral, his eye gleaming at the
attentive countenance of Captain Vincent. “This is a smart piece of work
on your part, Vincent. I can do no better than send you back to your
station. Yes ... Egypt ... the East.... Everything points that way,” he
soliloquised under Vincent’s eyes, while the secretary, picking up the
papers with care, rose quietly and went out to have them translated and
to make an abstract for the Admiral.

“And yet who knows!” exclaimed Lord Nelson, standing still for a
moment. “But the blame or the glory must be mine alone. I will seek
counsel from no man.” Captain Vincent felt himself forgotten, invisible,
less than a shadow in the presence of a nature capable of such vehement
feelings. “How long can he last?” he asked himself with sincere concern.

The Admiral, however, soon remembered his presence, and at the end of
another ten minutes Captain Vincent left the _Victory_, feeling, like
all officers who approached Lord Nelson, that he had been speaking with
a personal friend; and with a renewed devotion for the great
sea-officer’s soul dwelling in the frail body of the Commander-in-Chief
of His Majesty’s ships in the Mediterranean. While he was being pulled
back to his ship a general signal went up in the _Victory_ for the fleet
to form line, as convenient, ahead and astern of the Admiral; followed
by another to the _Amelia_ to part company. Vincent accordingly gave his
orders to make sail, and, directing the master to shape a course for
Cape Cicié, went down into his cabin. He had been up nearly the whole of
the last three nights, and he wanted to get a little sleep. His
slumbers, however, were short and disturbed. Early in the afternoon he
found himself broad awake and reviewing in his mind the events of the
day before. The order to shoot three brave men in cold blood, terribly
distasteful at the time, was lying heavily on him. Perhaps he had been
impressed by Peyrol’s white head, his obstinacy to escape him, the
determination shown to the very last minute; by something in the whole
episode that suggested a more than common devotion to duty and a spirit
of daring defiance. With his robust health, simple good nature, and
sanguine temperament touched with a little irony, Captain Vincent was a
man of generous feelings and of easily moved sympathies.

“Yet,” he reflected, “they have been asking for it. There could be only
one end to that affair. But the fact remains that they were defenceless
and unarmed and particularly harmless-looking, and at the same time as
brave as any. That old chap now....” He wondered how much of exact truth
there was in Symons’ tale of adventure. He concluded that the facts must
have been true but that Symons’ interpretation of them made it
extraordinarily difficult to discover what really there was under all
that. That craft certainly was fit for blockade running. Lord Nelson had
been pleased. Captain Vincent went on deck with the kindliest feelings
towards all men, alive and dead.

The afternoon had turned out very fine. The British fleet was just out
of sight with the exception of one or two stragglers, under a press of
canvas. A light breeze, in which only the _Amelia_ could travel at five
knots, hardly ruffled the profundity of the blue waters basking in the
warm tenderness of the cloudless sky. To south and west the horizon was
empty except for two specks very far apart, of which one shone white
like a bit of silver and the other appeared black like a drop of ink.
Captain Vincent, with his purpose firm in his mind, felt at peace with
himself. As he was easily accessible to his officers, his first
lieutenant ventured a question to which Captain Vincent replied:

“He looks very thin and worn out, but I don’t think he is as ill as he
thinks he is. I am sure you all would like to know that his Lordship is
pleased with our yesterday’s work--those papers were of some importance
you know--and generally with the _Amelia_. It was a queer chase, wasn’t
it?” he went on. “That tartane was clearly and unmistakably running away
from us. But she never had a chance against the _Amelia_.”

During the latter part of that speech the first lieutenant glanced
astern as if asking himself how long Captain Vincent proposed to drag
that tartane behind the _Amelia_. The two keepers in her wondered also
as to when they would be permitted to get back on board their ship.
Symons, who was one of them, declared that he was sick and tired of
steering the blamed thing. Moreover, the company on board made him
uncomfortable; for Symons was aware that in pursuance of Captain
Vincent’s orders, Mr. Bolt had had the three dead Frenchmen carried into
the cuddy, which he afterwards secured with an enormous padlock that,
apparently, belonged to it, and had taken the key on board the _Amelia_.
As to one of them, Symons’ unforgiving verdict was that it would have
served him right to be thrown ashore for crows to peck his eyes out. And
anyhow, he could not understand why he should have been turned into the
coxswain of a floating hearse, and be damned to it.... He grumbled
interminably.

Just about sunset, which is the time of burials at sea, the _Amelia_ was
hove to and, the rope being manned, the tartane was brought alongside
and her two keepers ordered on board their ship. Captain Vincent,
leaning over with his elbows on the rail, seemed lost in thought. At
last the first lieutenant spoke.

“What are we going to do with that tartane, sir? Our men are on board.”

“We are going to sink her by gunfire,” declared Captain Vincent
suddenly. “His ship makes a very good coffin for a seaman, and those men
deserve better than to be thrown overboard to roll on the waves. Let
them rest quietly at the bottom of the sea in the craft to which they
had stuck so well.”

The lieutenant, making no reply, waited for some more positive order.
Every eye on the ship was turned on the captain. But Captain Vincent
said nothing and seemed unable or unwilling to give it yet. He was
feeling vaguely that in all his good intentions there was something
wanting.

“Ah! Mr. Bolt,” he said, catching sight of the master’s mate in the
waist. “Did they have a flag on board that craft?”

“I think she had a tiny bit of ensign when the chase began, sir, but it
must have blown away. It is not at the end of her mainyard now.” He
looked over the side. “The halliards are rove, though,” he added.

“We must have a French ensign somewhere on board,” said Captain Vincent.

“Certainly, sir,” struck in the master, who was listening.

“Well, Mr. Bolt,” said Captain Vincent, “you have had most to do with
all this. Take a few men with you, bend the French ensign on the
halliards and sway his mainyard to the masthead.” He smiled at all the
faces turned towards him. “After all, they never surrendered and, by
heavens, gentlemen, we will let them go down with their colours flying.”

A profound but not disapproving silence reigned over the decks of the
ship while Mr. Bolt with three or four hands was busy executing the
order. Then suddenly above the top-gallant rail of the _Amelia_
appeared the upper curve of a lateen yard with the tricolour drooping
from the point. A subdued murmur from all hands greeted this apparition.
At the same time Captain Vincent ordered the line holding the tartane
alongside to be cast off and the mainyard of the _Amelia_ to be swung
round. The sloop, shooting ahead of her prize, left her stationary on
the sea, then putting the helm up, ran back abreast of her on the other
side. The port bow-gun was ordered to fire a round, aiming well forward.
That shot, however, went just over, taking the foremast out of the
tartane. The next was more successful, striking the little hull between
wind and water, and going out well under water on the other side. A
third was fired, as the men said, just for luck, and that too took
effect, a splintered hole appearing at the bow. After that the guns were
secured and the _Amelia_, with no brace being touched, was brought to
her course towards Cape Cicié. All hands on board of her with their
backs to the sunset sky, clear like a pale topaz above the hard blue gem
of the sea, watched the tartane give a sudden dip, followed by a slow,
unchecked dive. At last the tricolour flag alone remained visible for a
tense and interminable moment, pathetic and lonely, in the centre of a
brimful horizon. All at once it vanished, like a flame blown upon,
bringing to the beholders the sense of having been left face to face
with an immense, suddenly created solitude. On the decks of the _Amelia_
a low murmur died out.

       *       *       *       *       *

When Lieutenant Réal sailed away with the Toulon fleet on the great
strategical cruise which was to end in the Battle of Trafalgar, Madame
Réal returned with her aunt to her hereditary house at Escampobar. She
had only spent a few weeks in town, where she was not much seen in
public. The lieutenant and his wife lived in a little house near the
western gate, and the lieutenant’s official position, though he was
employed on the staff to the last, was not sufficiently prominent to
make her absence from official ceremonies at all remarkable. But this
marriage was an object of mild interest in naval circles. Those--mostly
men--who had seen Madame Réal at home, told stories of her dazzling
complexion, of her magnificent black eyes, of her personal and
attractive strangeness, and of the Arlesian costume she insisted on
wearing, even after her marriage to an officer of the navy, being
herself sprung from farmer stock. It was also said that her father and
mother had fallen victims in the massacres of Toulon after the
evacuation of the town; but all those stories varied in detail and were
on the whole very vague. Whenever she went abroad Mrs. Réal was attended
by her aunt, who aroused almost as much curiosity as herself: a
magnificent old woman with upright carriage and an austere, brown,
wrinkled face showing signs of past beauty. Catherine was also seen
alone in the streets, where, as a matter of fact, people turned round to
look after the thin and dignified figure, remarkable amongst the
passers-by, whom she herself did not seem to see. About her escape from
the massacres most wonderful tales were told, and she acquired the
reputation of a heroine. Arlette’s aunt was known to frequent the
churches, which were all open to the faithful now, carrying even into
the house of God her sibylline aspect of a prophetess and her austere
manner. It was not at the services that she was seen most. People would
see her oftener in an empty nave, standing slim and as straight as an
arrow in the shade of a mighty pillar as if making a call on the Creator
of all things, with whom she had made her peace generously, and now
would petition only for pardon and reconciliation with her niece
Arlette. For Catherine for a long time remained uncertain of the future.
She did not get rid of her involuntary awe of her niece as a selected
object of God’s wrath until towards the end of her life. There was also
another soul for which she was concerned. The pursuit of the tartane by
the _Amelia_ had been observed from various points of the islands that
close the roadstead of Hyères, and the English ship had been seen from
the Fort de la Vigie opening fire on her chase. The result, though the
two vessels soon ran out of sight, could not be a matter of doubt. There
was also the story told by a coaster, that got into Fréjus, of a tartane
being fired on by a square-rigged man-of-war; but that apparently was
the next day. All these rumours pointed one way and were the foundation
of the report made by Lieutenant Réal to the Toulon Admiralty. That
Peyrol went out to sea in his tartane and was never seen again was, of
course, an incontrovertible fact.

The day before the two women were to go back to Escampobar Catherine
approached a priest in the church of Ste Marie Majeure, a little
unshaven fat man with a watery eye, in order to arrange for some masses
to be said for the dead.

“But for whose soul are we to pray?” mumbled the priest in a wheezy low
tone.

“Pray for the soul of Jean,” said Catherine. “Yes, Jean. There is no
other name.”

Lieutenant Réal, wounded at Trafalgar, but escaping capture, retired
with the rank of Capitaine de Frégate and vanished from the eyes of the
naval world in Toulon, and indeed from the world altogether. Whatever
sign brought him back to Escampobar on that momentous night was not
meant to call him to his death but to a quiet and retired life, obscure
in a sense but not devoid of dignity. In the course of years he became
the Mayor of the Commune in that very same little village which had
looked on Escampobar as the abode of iniquity, the sojourn of
blood-drinkers and of wicked women.

One of the earliest excitements breaking the monotony of the Escampobar
life was the discovery at the bottom of the well, one dry year when the
water got very low, of some considerable obstruction. After a lot of
trouble in getting it up, this obstruction turned out to be a garment
made of sail-cloth, which had armholes and three horn buttons in front,
and looked like a waistcoat; but it was lined, positively quilted, with
a surprising quantity of gold pieces of various ages, coinages and
nationalities. Nobody but Peyrol could have put it there. Catherine was
able to give the exact date; because she remembered seeing him doing
something at the well on the very morning before he went out to sea with
Michel, carrying off Scevola. Captain Réal could guess easily the origin
of that treasure, and he decided with his wife’s approval to give it up
to the Government as the hoard of a man who had died intestate with no
discoverable relations, and whose very name had been a matter of
uncertainty, even to himself. After that event the uncertain name of
Peyrol found itself oftener and oftener on Monsieur and Madame Réal’s
lips, on which before it was but seldom heard; though the recollection
of his white-headed, quiet, irresistible personality haunted every
corner of the Escampobar fields. From that time they talked of him
openly, as though he had come back to live again amongst them.

Many years afterwards, one fine evening Monsieur and Madame Réal,
sitting on the bench outside the salle (the house had not been altered
at all outside except that it was now kept whitewashed), began to talk
of that episode and of the man who, coming from the seas, had crossed
their lives to disappear at sea again.

“How did he get all that lot of gold?” wondered Madame Réal innocently.
“He could not possibly want it; and, Eugène, why should he have put it
down there?”

“That, ma chère amie,” said Réal, “is not an easy question to answer.
Men and women are not so simple as they seem. Even you, fermière (he
used to give his wife that name jocularly sometimes), are not so simple
as some people would take you to be. I think that if Peyrol were here he
could not perhaps answer your question himself.”

And they went on, reminding each other in short phrases separated by
long silences, of his peculiarities of person and behaviour, when, above
the slope leading down to Madrague, there appeared, first the pointed
ears and then the whole body of a very diminutive donkey of a light grey
colour with dark points. Two pieces of wood, strangely shaped, projected
on each side of his body as far as his head, like very long shafts of a
cart. But the donkey dragged no cart after him. He was carrying on his
back on a small pack-saddle the torso of a man who did not seem to have
any legs. The little animal, beautifully groomed and with an intelligent
and even impudent physiognomy, stopped in front of Monsieur and Madame
Réal. The man, balancing himself cleverly on the pack-saddle with his
withered legs crossed in front of him, slipped off, disengaged his
crutches from each side of the donkey smartly, propped himself on them,
and with his open palm gave the animal a resounding thwack which sent it
trotting into the yard. The cripple of the Madrague in his quality of
Peyrol’s friend (for the rover had often talked of him both to the women
and to Lieutenant Réal with great appreciation--“C’est un homme ça”) had
become a member of the Escampobar community. His employment was to run
about the country on errands, most unfit, one would think, for a man
without legs. But the donkey did all the walking while the cripple
supplied the sharp wits and an unfailing memory. The poor fellow,
snatching off his hat and holding it with one hand alongside his right
crutch, approached to render his account of the day in the simple words:
“Everything has been done as you ordered, Madame”; then lingered, a
privileged servant, familiar but respectful, attractive with his soft
eyes, long face and his pained smile.

“We were just talking of Peyrol,” remarked Captain Réal.

“Ah, one could talk a long time of him,” said the cripple. “He told me
once that if I had been complete--with legs like everybody else, I
suppose he meant--I would have made a good comrade away there in the
distant seas. He had a great heart.”

“Yes,” murmured Madame Réal thoughtfully. Then, turning to her husband,
she asked: “What sort of man was he really, Eugène?” Captain Réal
remained silent. “Did you ever ask yourself that question?” she
insisted.

“Yes,” said Réal. “But the only certain thing we can say of him is that
he was not a bad Frenchman.”

“Everything’s in that,” murmured the cripple, with fervent conviction,
in the silence that fell upon Réal’s words and Arlette’s faint sigh of
memory.

The blue level of the Mediterranean, the charmer and the deceiver of
audacious men, kept the secret of its fascination--hugged to its calm
breast the victims of all the wars, calamities and tempests of its
history, under the marvellous purity of the sunset sky. A few rosy
clouds floated high up over the Esterel range. The breath of the evening
breeze came to cool the heated rocks of Escampobar; and the
mulberry-tree, the only big tree on the head of the peninsula, standing
like a sentinel at the gate of the yard, sighed faintly in a shudder of
all its leaves as if regretting the Brother of the Coast, the man of
dark deeds, but of large heart, who often at noonday would lie down to
sleep under its shade.


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