He turned away from the window and found himself face to face with the sans-culotte, who had apparently come up to him from behind, perhaps with the intention of tapping him on the shoulder, but who now turned away his head. The young woman had disappeared.
“Tell me, patron,” said Peyrol, “is there anywhere near this house a little dent in the shore with a bit of beach in it perhaps where I could keep a boat?”
“What do you want a boat for?”
“To go fishing when I have a fancy to,” answered Peyrol curtly.
Citizen Bron, suddenly subdued, told him that what he wanted was to be found a couple of hundred yards down the hill from the house. The coast, of course, was full of indentations, but this was a perfect little pool. And the Toulon blood-drinker’s almond-shaped eyes became strangely sombre as they gazed at the attentive Peyrol. A perfect little pool, he repeated, opening from a cove that the English knew well. He paused. Peyrol observed without much animosity but in a tone of conviction that it was very difficult to keep off the English whenever there was a bit of salt water anywhere; but what could have brought English seamen to a spot like this he couldn’t imagine.
“It was when their fleet first came here,” said the patriot in a gloomy voice, “and hung round the coast before the anti-revolutionary traitors let them into Toulon, sold the sacred soil of their country for a handful of gold. Yes, in the days before the crime was consummated English officers used to land in that cove at night and walk up to this very house.”
“What audacity!” commented Peyrol, who was really surprised. “But that’s just like what they are.” Still, it was hard to believe. But wasn’t it only a tale?
The patriot flung one arm up in a strained gesture. “I swore to its truth before the tribunal,” he said. “It was a dark story,” he cried shrilly, and paused. “It cost her father his life,” he said in a low voice … “her mother too—but the country was in danger,” he added still lower.
Peyrol walked away to the western window and looked towards Toulon. In the middle of the great sheet of water within Cape Cicié a tall two-decker lay becalmed and the little dark dots on the water were her boats trying to tow her head round the right way. Peyrol watched them for a moment, and then walked back to the middle of the room.
“Did you actually drag him from this house to the guillotine?” he asked in his unemotional voice.
The patriot shook his head thoughtfully, with downcast eyes. “No, he came over to Toulon just before the evacuation, this friend of the English … sailed over in a tartane he owned that is still lying here at the Madrague. He had his wife with him. They came over to take home their daughter, who was living then with some skulking old nuns. The victorious Republicans were closing in and the slaves of tyranny had to fly.”
“Came to fetch their daughter,” mused Peyrol. “Strange, that guilty people should. …”
The patriot looked up fiercely. “It was justice,” he said loudly. “They were anti-revolutionists, and if they had never spoken to an Englishman in their life the atrocious crime was on their heads.”
“H’m, stayed too long for their daughter,” muttered Peyrol. “And so it was you who brought her home.”
“I did,” said the patron. For a moment his eyes evaded Peyrol’s investigating glance, but in a moment he looked straight into his face. “No lessons of base superstition could corrupt her soul,” he declared with exaltation. “I brought home a patriot.”
Peyrol, very calm, gave him a hardly perceptible nod. “Well,” he said, “all this won’t prevent me sleeping very well in this room. I always thought I would like to live in a lighthouse when I got tired of roving about the seas. This is as near a lighthouse lantern as can be. You will see me with all my little affairs to-morrow,” he added, moving towards the stairs. “Salut, citoyen.”
There was in Peyrol a fund of self-command amounting to placidity. There were men living in the East who had no doubt whatever that Peyrol was a calmly terrible man. And they would quote illustrative instances which from their own point of view were simply admirable. But all Peyrol had ever done was to behave rationally, as it seemed to him, in all sorts of dangerous circumstances without ever being led astray by the nature, or the cruelty, or the danger of any given situation. He adapted himself to the character of the event and to the very spirit of it, with a profound responsive feeling of a particularly unsentimental kind. Sentiment in itself was an artificiality of which he had never heard and if he had seen it in action would have appeared to him too puzzling to make anything of. That sort of genuineness in acceptance made him a satisfactory inmate of the Escampobar Farm. He duly turned up with all his cargo, as he called it, and was met at the door of the farmhouse itself by the young woman with the pale face and wandering eyes. Nothing could hold her attention for long amongst her familiar surroundings. Right and left and far away beyond you, she seemed to be looking for something while you were talking to her, so that you doubted whether she could follow what you said. But as a matter of fact she had all her wits about her. In the midst of this strange search for something that was not there she had enough detachment to smile at Peyrol. Then, withdrawing into the kitchen, she watched, as much as her restless eyes could watch anything, Peyrol’s cargo and Peyrol himself passing up the stairs.
The most valuable part of Peyrol’s cargo being strapped to his person, the first thing he did after being left alone in that attic room which was like the lantern of a lighthouse was to relieve himself of the burden and lay it on the foot of the bed. Then he sat down, and leaning his elbow far on the table he contemplated it with a feeling of complete relief. That plunder had never burdened his conscience. It had merely on occasion oppressed his body; and if it had at all affected his spirits it was not by its secrecy but by its mere weight, which was inconvenient, irritating, and towards the end of a day altogether insupportable. It made a free-limbed, deep-breathing sailor-man feel like a mere overloaded animal, thus extending whatever there was of compassion in Peyrol’s nature towards the four-footed beasts that carry men’s burdens on the earth. The necessities of a lawless life had taught Peyrol to be ruthless, but he had never been cruel.
Sprawling in the chair, stripped to the waist, robust and grey-haired, his head with a Roman profile propped up on a mighty and tattooed forearm, he remained at ease, with his eyes fixed on his treasure with an air of meditation. Yet Peyrol was not meditating (as a superficial observer might have thought) on the best place of concealment. It was not that he had not had a great experience of that sort of property which had always melted so quickly through his fingers. What made him meditative was its character, not of a share of a hard-won booty in toil, in risk, in danger, in privation, but of a piece of luck personally his own. He knew what plunder was and how soon it went; but this lot had come to stay. He had it with him, away from the haunts of his lifetime, as if in another world altogether. It couldn’t be drunk away, gambled away, squandered away in any sort of familiar circumstances, or even given away.