“You will eat with us here,” said his guide, and passed without stopping into a narrow passage giving access to a steep flight of stairs. Above the first landing a narrow spiral staircase led to the upper part of the farmhouse; and when the sans-culotte flung open the solid plank door at which it ended he disclosed to Peyrol a large low room containing a four-poster bedstead piled up high with folded blankets and spare pillows. There were also two wooden chairs and a large oval table.
“We could arrange this place for you,” said the master, “but I don’t know what the mistress will have to say,” he added.
Peyrol, struck by the peculiar expression of his face, turned his head and saw the girl standing in the doorway. It was as though she had floated up after them, for not the slightest sound of rustle or footfall had warned Peyrol of her presence. The pure complexion of her white cheeks was set off brilliantly by her coral lips and the bands of raven black hair only partly covered by a muslin cap trimmed with lace. She made no sign, uttered no sound, behaved exactly as if there had been nobody in the room; and Peyrol suddenly averted his eyes from that mute and unconscious face with its roaming eyes.
In some way or other, however, the sans-culotte seemed to have ascertained her mind, for he said in a final tone:
“That’s all right then,” and there was a short silence, during which the woman shot her dark glances all round the room again and again, while on her lips there was a half-smile, not so much absent-minded as totally unmotived, which Peyrol observed with a side glance, but could not make anything of. She did not seem to know him at all.
“You have a view of salt water on three sides of you,” remarked Peyrol’s future host.
The farmhouse was a tall building, and this large attic with its three windows commanded on one side the view of Hyères Roadstead on the first plan, with further blue undulations of the coast as far as Fréjus; and on the other the vast semicircle of barren high hills, broken by the entrance to Toulon harbour guarded by forts and batteries, and ending in Cape Cépet, a squat mountain, with sombre folds and a base of brown rocks, with a white spot gleaming on the very summit of it, a ci-devant shrine dedicated to Our Lady, and a ci-devant place of pilgrimage. The noonday glare seemed absorbed by the gemlike surface of the sea perfectly flawless in the invincible depth of its colour.
“It’s like being in a lighthouse,” said Peyrol. “Not a bad place for a seaman to live in.” The sight of the sails dotted about cheered his heart. The people of landsmen with their houses and animals and activities did not count. What made for him the life of any strange shore were the craft that belonged to it: canoes, catamarans, ballahous, praus, lorchas, mere dug-outs, or even rafts of tied logs with a bit of mat for a sail from which naked brown men fished along stretches of white sand crushed under the tropical skyline, sinister in its glare and with a thunder-cloud crouching on the horizon. But here he beheld a perfect serenity, nothing sombre on the shore, nothing ominous in the sunshine. The sky rested lightly on the distant and vaporous outline of the hills; and the immobility of all things seemed poised in the air like a gay mirage. On this tideless sea several tartanes lay becalmed in the Petite Passe between Porquerolles and Cape Esterel, yet theirs was not the stillness of death but of light slumber, the immobility of a smiling enchantment, of a Mediterranean fair day, breathless sometimes but never without life. Whatever enchantment Peyrol had known in his wanderings it had never been so remote from all thoughts of strife and death, so full of smiling security, making all his past appear to him like a chain of lurid days and sultry nights. He thought he would never want to get away from it, as though he had obscurely felt that his old rover’s soul had been always rooted there. Yes, this was the place for him; not because expediency dictated, but simply because his instinct of rest had found its home at last.
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,
