The other, who was feeling the effect of the d 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 mariners" 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 his 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 cheerfuclass="underline" "It looks as if he were not going to die."
"He is dead," said Peyrol with grim jocularity. "Dead drunk. And you very likely will not see me till to-morrow sometime."
"But what am I to do?" asked Michel timidly.
"Nothing," said Peyrol. "Of course you must not let him set fire to the tartane."
"But suppose," insisted Michel, "he should give signs of escaping."
"If you see him trying to escape," said Peyrol with mock solemnity, "then, Michel, it will be a sign for you to get out of his way as quickly as you can. A man who would try to escape with a head like this on him would just swallow you at one mouthful."
He picked up his cudgel and, stepping ashore, went off without as much as a look at his faithful henchman. Michel listened to him scrambling amongst the stones, and his habitual amiably vacant face acquired a sort of dignity from the utter and absolute blankness that came over it.
X
IT WAS only after reaching the level ground in front of the farmhouse that Peyrol took time to pause and resume his contact with the exterior world.
While he had been closeted with his prisoner the sky had got covered with a thin layer of cloud, in one of those swift changes of weather that are not unusual in the Mediterranean. This grey vapour, drifting high up, close against the disc of the sun, seemed to enlarge the space behind its veil, add to the vastness of a shadowless world no longer hard and brilliant but all softened in the contours of its masses and in the faint line of the horizon, as if ready to dissolve in the immensity of the Infinite.
Familiar and indifferent to his eyes, material and shadowy, the extent of the changeable sea had gone pale under the pale sun in a mysterious and emotional response. Mysterious too was the great oval patch of dark water to the west; and also a broad blue lane traced on the dull silver of the waters in a parabolic curve described magistrally by an invisible finger for a symbol of endless wandering. The face of the farmhouse might have been the face of a house from which all the inhabitants had fled suddenly. In the high part of the building the window of the lieutenant's room remained open, both glass and shutter. By the door of the salle the stable fork leaning against the wall seemed to have been forgotten by the sans-culotte. This aspect of abandonment struck Peyrol with more force than usual. He had been thinking so hard of all these people, that to find no one about seemed unnatural and even depressing. He had seen many abandoned places in his life, grass huts, mud forts, kings' palaces – temples from which every white-robed soul had fled. Temples, however, never looked quite empty. The gods clung to their own. Peyrol's eyes rested on the bench against the wall of the salle. In the usual course of things it should have been occupied by the lieutenant who had the habit of sitting there with hardly a movement, for hours, like a spider watching for the coming of a fly. This paralyzing 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.