VIII

PERCHED sideways on the circular wall bordering the well, in the full blaze of the midday sun, the rover of the distant seas and the fisherman of the lagoon, sharing between them a most surprising secret, had the air of two men conferring in the dark. The first word that Peyrol said was, "Well?"

"All quiet,” said the other.

"Have you fastened the cabin door properly?" "You know what the fastenings are like.”

Peyrol could not deny that. It was a sufficient answer. It shifted the responsibility on to his shoulders and all his life he had been accustomed to trust to the work of his own hands, in peace and in war. Yet he looked doubtfully at Michel before he remarked:

"Yes, but I know the man too."

There could be no greater contrast than those two faces: Peyrol's clean, like a carving of stone, and only very little softened by time, and that of the owner of the late dog, hirsute, with many silver threads, with something elusive in the features and the vagueness of expression of a baby in arms. "Yes, I know the man," repeated Peyrol. Michel's mouth fell open at this, a small oval set a little crookedly in the innocent face.

"He will never wake," he suggested timidly.

The possession of a common and momentous secret drawing men together, Peyrol condescended to explain. "You don't know the thickness of his skull. I do."

He spoke as though he had made it himself. Michel,

who in the face of that positive statement had forgotten to shut his mouth, had nothing to say.

"He breathes all right?" asked Peyrol.

"Yes. After I got out and locked the door I listened for a bit and I thought I heard him snore."

Peyrol looked interested and also slightly anxious. "I had to come up and show myself this morning as if nothing had happened," he said. "The officer has been here for two days and he might have taken it into his head to go down to the tartane. I have been on the stretch all the morning. A goat jumping up was enough to give me a turn. Fancy him running up here with his broken head all bandaged up, with you after him."

This seemed to be too much for Michel. He said almost indignantly:

"The man's half killed."

"It takes a lot to even half kill a Brother of the Coast. There are men and men. You, for instance," Peyrol continued placidly, "you would have been altogether killed if it had been your head that got in the way. And there are animals, beasts twice your size, regular monsters, that may be killed with nothing more than just a tap on the nose. That's well known. I was really afraid he would overcome you in some way or other.

"Come, maître! One isn't a little child," protested Michel against this accumulation of improbabilities. He did it, however, only in a whisper and with childlike shyness. Peyrol folded his arms on his breast:

"Go, finish your soup," he commanded in a low voice, "and then go down to the tartane. You locked the cabin door properly, you said?"

"Yes, I have," protested Michel, staggered by this display of anxiety. "He could sooner burst the deck above his head, as you know."

“All the same, take a small spar and shore up that door against the heel of the mast. And then watch outside. Don't you go in to him on any account. Stay on deck and keep a lookout for me. There is a tangle here that won't be easily cleared and I must be very careful. I will try to slip away and get down as soon as I get rid of that officer.”

The conference in the sunshine being ended, Peyrol walked leisurely out of the yard gate, and protruding his head beyond the corner of the house, saw Lieutenant Réal sitting on the bench. This he had expected to see. But he had not expected to see him there alone. It was just like this: wherever Arlette happened to be, there were worrying possibilities. But she might have been helping her aunt in the kitchen with her sleeves rolled up on such white arms as Peyrol had never seen on any woman before. The way she had taken to dressing her hair in a plait with a broad black velvet ribbon and an Arlesian cap was very becoming. She was wearing now her mother's clothes of which there were chestfuls, altered for her of course. The late mistress of the Escampobar Farm had been an Arlesienne. Well-to-do, too. Yes, even for women's clothes the Escampobar natives could do without intercourse with the outer world. It was quite time that this confounded lieutenant went back to Toulon. This was the third day. His short leave must be up. Peyrol's attitude towards naval officers had been always guarded and suspicious. His relations with them had been very mixed. They had been his enemies and his superiors. He had been chased by them. He had been trusted by them. The Revolution had made a clean cut across the consistency of his wild life-Brother of the Coast and gunner in the national navy-and yet he was always the same man. It was like that, too, with them.

Of

ficers of the King, officers of the Republic, it was only changing the skin. All alike looked askance at a free rover. Even this one could not forget his epaulettes when talking to him. Scorn and mistrust of epaulettes were rooted deeply in old Peyrol. Yet he did not absolutely hate Lieutenant Réal. Only the fellow's coming to the farm was generally a curse and his presence at that particular moment a confounded nuisance and to a certain extent even a danger. “I have no mind to be hauled to Toulon by the scruff of my neck," Peyrol said to himself. There was no trusting those epaulette wearers. Any one of them was capable of jumping on his best friend on account of some officer-like notion or other.

Peyrol, stepping round the corner, sat down by the side of Lieutenant Réal with the feeling somehow of coming to grips with a slippery customer. The lieutenant, as he sat there, unaware of Peyrol's survey of his person, gave no notion of slipperiness. On the contrary, he looked rather immovably established. Very much at home. Too much at home. Even after Peyrol sat down by his side he continued to look immovable-or at least difficult to get rid of. In the still noonday heat the faint shrilling of cicadas was the only sound of life heard for quite a long time. Delicate, evanescent, cheerful, careless sort of life, yet not without passion. A sudden gloom seemed to be cast over the joy of the cicadas by the lieutenant's voice though the words were the most perfunctory possible.

"Tiens! Vous voilà."

In the stress of the situation Peyrol at once asked himself: "Now why does he say that? Where did he expect me to be?" The lieutenant need not have spoken at all. He had known him now for about two years off and on, and it had happened many times that

they had sat side by side on that bench in a sort of “at arms' length" equality without exchanging a single word. And why could he not have kept quiet now? That naval officer never spoke without an object, but what could one make of words like that? Peyrol achieved an insincere yawn and suggested mildly: "A bit of siesta wouldn't be amiss.

think, lieutenant?"

What do you

And to himself he thought: "No fear, he won't go to his room." He would stay there and thereby keep him, Peyrol, from going down to the cove. He turned his eyes on that naval officer, and if extreme and concentrated desire and mere force of will could have had any effect Lieutenant Réal would certainly have been removed suddenly from that bench. But he didn't move. And Peyrol was astonished to see that man smile, but what astonished him still more was to hear

him say:

"The trouble is that you have never been frank with me, Peyrol."

"Frank with you," repeated the rover.

"You want me to be frank with you? Well, I have wished you to the devil many times."

"That's better," said Lieutenant Réal. "But why? I never tried to do you any harm."

"Me harm," cried Peyrol, "to me?"

But he faltered in his indignation as if frightened at it and ended in a very quiet tone: "You have been nosing in a lot of dirty papers to find something against a man who was not doing you any harm and was a seaman before you were born."

"Quite a mistake. There was no nosing amongst papers. I came on them quite by accident. I won't deny I was intrigué finding a man of your sort living in this place. But don't be uneasy. Nobody would