Peyrol, who had seen death face to face many times, looked at Catherine's fine brown profile curiously.
“It is a fact,” he murmured, “that men who rush out to seek death do not often find it. So one must have a sign? What sort of sign would it be?”
“How is anybody to know?” asked Catherine, staring across the kitchen at the wall. “Even those to whom it is made do not recognize it for what it is. But they obey all the same. I tell you, Peyrol, nothing can stop them. It may be a glance, or a smile, or a shadow on the water, or a thought that passes through the head. For my poor brother and sister-in-law it was the face of their child.”
Peyrol folded his arms on his breast and dropped his head. Melancholy was a sentiment to which he was a stranger; for what has melancholy to do with the life of a sea-rover, a Brother of the Coast, a simple, venturesome, precarious life, full of risks and leaving no time for introspection or for that momentary self-forgetfulness which is called gaiety. Sombre fury, fierce merriment, he had known in passing gusts, coming from outside; but never this intimate inward sense of the vanity of all things, that doubt of the power within himself.
“I wonder what the sign for me will be,” he thought; and concluded with self-contempt that for him there would be no sign, that he would have to die in his bed like an old yard dog in his kennel. Having reached that depth of despondency, there was nothing more before him but a black gulf into which his consciousness sank like a stone.
The silence which had lasted perhaps a minute after Catherine had finished speaking was traversed suddenly by a clear high voice saying:
“What are you two plotting here?”
Arlette stood in the doorway of the salle. The gleam of light in the whites of her eyes set off her black and penetrating glance. The surprise was complete. The profile of Catherine, who was standing by the table, became if possible harder; a sharp carving of an old prophetess of some desert tribe. Arlette made three steps forward. In Peyrol even extreme astonishment was deliberate. He had been famous for never looking as though he had been caught unprepared. Age had accentuated that trait of a born leader. He only slipped off the edge of the table and said in his deep voice:
“Why, patronne! We haven't said a word to each other for ever so long.”
Arlette moved nearer still. “I know,” she cried. “It was horrible. I have been watching you two. Scevola came and dumped himself on the bench close to me. He began to talk to me, and so I went away. That man bores me. And here I find you people saying nothing. It's insupportable. What has come to you both? Say, you, Papa Peyrol — don't you like me any more?” Her voice filled the kitchen. Peyrol went to the salle door and shut it. While coming back he was staggered by the brilliance of life within her that seemed to pale the flames of the lamp. He said half in jest:
“I don't know whether I didn't like you better when you were quieter.”
“And you would like best to see me still quieter in my grave.”
She dazzled him. Vitality streamed out of her eyes, her lips, her whole person, enveloped her like a halo and . . . yes, truly, the faintest possible flush had appeared on her cheeks, played on them faintly rosy like the light of a distant flame on the snow. She raised her arms up in the air and let her hands fall from on high on Peyrol's shoulders, captured his desperately dodging eyes with her black and compelling glance, put out all her instinctive seduction — while he felt a growing fierceness in the grip of her fingers.
“No! I can't hold it in! Monsieur Peyrol, Papa Peyrol, old gunner, you horrid sea-wolf, be an angel and tell me where he is.”
The rover, whom only that morning the powerful grasp of Lieutenant Réal found as unshakable as a rock, felt all his strength vanish under the hands of that woman. He said thickly:
“He has gone to Toulon. He had to go.”
“What for? Speak the truth to me!”
“Truth is not for everybody to know,” mumbled Peyrol, with a sinking sensation as though the very ground were going soft under his feet. “On service,” he added in a growl.
Her hands slipped suddenly from his big shoulders. “On service?” she repeated. “What service?” Her voice sank and the words “Oh, yes! His service” were hardly heard by Peyrol, who as soon as her hands had left his shoulders felt his strength returning to him and the yielding earth grow firm again under his feet. Right in front of him Arlette, silent, with her arms hanging down before her with entwined fingers, seemed stunned because Lieutenant Réal was not free from all earthly connections, like a visiting angel from heaven depending only on God to whom she had prayed. She had to share him with some service that could order him about. She felt in herself a strength, a power, greater than any service.
“Peyrol,” she cried low, “don't break my heart, my new heart, that has just begun to beat. Feel how it beats. Who could bear it?” She seized the rover's thick hairy paw and pressed it hard against her breast. “Tell me when he will be back.”
“Listen, patronne, you had better go upstairs,” began Peyrol with a great effort and snatching his captured hand away. He staggered backwards a little while Arlette shouted at him:
“You can't order me about as you used to do.” In all the changes from entreaty to anger she never struck a false note, so that her emotional outburst had the heart-moving power of inspired art. She turned round with a tempestuous swish to Catherine who had neither stirred nor emitted a sound: “Nothing you two can do will make any difference now.” The next moment she was facing Peyrol again. “You frighten me with your white hairs. Come! . . . am I to go on my knees to you? . . . There!”
The rover caught her under the elbows, swung her up clear of the ground, and set her down on her feet as if she had been a child. Directly he had let her go, she stamped her foot at him.
“Are you stupid?” she cried. “Don't you understand that something has happened to-day?”
Through all this scene Peyrol had kept his head as creditably as could have been expected, in the manner of a seaman caught by a white squall in the tropics. But at those words a dozen thoughts tried to rush together through his mind, in chase of that startling declaration. Something had happened! Where? How? Whom to? What thing? It couldn't be anything between her and the lieutenant. He had, it seemed to him, never lost sight of the lieutenant from the first hour when they met in the morning till he had sent him off to Toulon by an actual push on the shoulder; except while he was having his dinner in the next room with the door open, and for the few minutes spent in talking with Michel in the yard. But that was only a very few minutes, and directly afterwards the first sight of the lieutenant sitting gloomily on the bench like a lonely crow did not suggest either elation or excitement or any emotion connected with a woman. In the face of these difficulties Peyrol's mind became suddenly a blank. “Voyons, patronne,” he began, unable to think of anything else to say. “What's all this fuss about? I expect him to be back here about midnight.”
He was extremely relieved to notice that she believed him. It was the truth. For indeed he did not know what he could have invented on the spur of the moment that would get her out of the way and induce her to go to bed. She treated him to a sinister frown and a terribly menacing, “If you have lied . . . Oh!”
He produced an indulgent smile. “Compose yourself. He will be here soon after midnight. You may go to sleep with an easy mind.”
She turned her back on him contemptuously, and said curtly, “Come along, aunt,” and went to the door leading to the passage. There she turned for a moment with her hand on the door handle.
“You are changed. I can't trust either of you. You are not the same people.”
She went out. Only then did Catherine detach her gaze from the wall to meet Peyrol's eyes. “Did you hear what she said? We! Changed! It is she herself. . .”
Peyrol nodded twice and there was a long pause, during which even the flames of the lamp did not stir.
“Go after her, Mademoiselle