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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 Real 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 shoulderstraps, your uniform
coat.''
``I carry no papers in my pocket, and . . .'' A sudden thought seemed to
strike the lieutenant, a thought so intense and farfetched as to give his
mental effort a momentary aspect of vacancy. He shook it off and went on in a
changed tone: ``The shoulderstraps 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
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he met Peyrol's puzzled, sidelong glance provoked by the inexplicable
character of these words.
``I bet,'' said the lieutenant, ``that ever since I came here first you have
been more or less worrying your old head about my motives and intentions.''
Peyrol said simply: ``You came here on service at first and afterwards you
came again because even in the
Toulon fleet an officer may get a few days' leave. As to your intentions, I
won't say anything about them.
Especially as regards myself. About ten minutes ago anybody looking on would
have thought they were not friendly to me.''
The lieutenant sat up suddenly. By that time the English sloop, getting away
from under the land, had become visible even from the spot on which they sat.
``Look!'' exclaimed Real. ``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 Real.
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 Real 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 Real
suffered from contradictory feelings. Real was the son of a cidevant
couplesmall provincial gentry who had both lost their heads on the scaffold,
within the same week. As to their boy, he was apprenticed by order of the
Delegate of the Revolutionary Committee of his town to a poor but pureminded
joiner, who could not
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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 lifemore
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
selfcontained. 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 Real'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 Real, on his back, closing his eyes to the glare of the sky,
meditated on old Peyrol, while Peyrol himself, with his white head bare in the
sunshine, seemed to be sitting by the side of a corpse. What in that man
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