Ina 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 voiceon 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 hadsomehow 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 inthe 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 vaultedover 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 allthe 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 theofficer, “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 reachedthem 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 hispace. “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 verydeep 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 acreature 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 mobilitywas 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 quiverin 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.”
AsPeyrol 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 sloopAmeliahad 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 therewas 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. Hesent 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 hisfeeble 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 theAmeliawould 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 hadbeen 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. TheAmelia, 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 theAmeliaand 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. Thatreally 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 whilehe 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 thatthere 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 wemust 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.
Bythat time theAmeliahad 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 upto 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 glanceprovoked 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 byorder 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, seemedto 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 herway 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 nearlya 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 awayfrom 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 Ididn’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 anEmperor. 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 couldbe 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.