“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 appreciativenod 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 stoodwith 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.
Onlosing 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, eightor 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 echoedthe 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 brokenwas 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 armsalong 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 withoutremark, 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 robbedhim 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 accomplishedanything 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 parton 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 thingwas 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 tolet 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, wentoff 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.
Itwas 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 wallseemed 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 smartelegance. 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 ofthe 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 theAmeliacould 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 corvettemaking 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.
TheAmeliahad 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 isthe 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 greentops 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 acold 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. Latein 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, whenall 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 andthe 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 littleflame 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.”