In a tiny bit of a looking-glass hung on the frame of the east window,
Peyrol, handling the unwearable English blade, was shaving himself--for
the day was Sunday. The years of political changes ending with the
proclamation of Napoleon as Consul for life had not touched Peyrol
except as to his strong thick head of hair, which was nearly all white
now. After putting the razor away carefully, Peyrol introduced his
stockinged feet into a pair of sabots of the very best quality and
clattered downstairs. His brown cloth breeches were untied at the knee
and the sleeves of his shirt rolled up to his shoulders. That sea rover
turned rustic was now perfectly at home in that farm which, like a
lighthouse, commanded the view of two roadsteads and of the open sea. He
passed through the kitchen. It was exactly as he had seen it
first--sunlight on the floor, red copper utensils shining on the walls,
the table in the middle scrubbed snowy white; and it was only the old
woman, Aunt Catherine, who seemed to have acquired a sharper profile.
The very hen manœuvring her neck pretentiously on the doorstep, might
have been standing there for the last eight years. Peyrol shooed her
away, and going into the yard washed himself lavishly at the pump. When
he returned from the yard he looked so fresh and hale that old Catherine
complimented him in a thin voice on his “bonne mine.” Manners were
changing, and she addressed him no longer as citoyen but as Monsieur
Peyrol. He answered readily that if her heart was free he was ready to
lead her to the altar that very day. This was such an old joke that
Catherine took no notice of it whatever, but followed him with her eyes
as he crossed the kitchen into the salle, which was cool, with its
tables and benches washed clean, and no living soul in it. Peyrol passed
through to the front of the house, leaving the outer door open. At the
clatter of his clogs a young man sitting outside on a bench turned his
head and greeted him by a careless nod. His face was rather long,
sunburnt and smooth, with a slightly curved nose and a very well-shaped
chin. He wore a dark blue naval jacket open on a white shirt and a black
neckerchief tied in a slip-knot with long ends. White breeches and
stockings and black shoes with steel buckles completed his costume. A
brass-hilted sword in a black scabbard worn on a cross-belt was lying on
the ground at his feet. Peyrol, silver-headed and ruddy, sat down on the
bench at some little distance. The level piece of rocky ground in front
of the house was not very extensive, falling away to the sea in a
declivity framed between the rises of two barren hills. The old rover
and the young seaman with their arms folded across their chests gazed
into space, exchanging no words, like close intimates or like distant
strangers. Neither did they stir when the master of the Escampobar Farm
appeared out of the yard gate with a manure fork on his shoulder and
started to cross the piece of level ground. His grimy hands, his
rolled-up shirt-sleeves, the fork over the shoulder, the whole of his
working-day aspect had somehow an air of being a manifestation; but the
patriot dragged his dirty clogs low-spiritedly in the fresh light of the
young morning, in a way no real worker on the land would ever do at the
end of a day of toil. Yet there were no signs of debility about his
person. His oval face with rounded cheek-bones remained unwrinkled
except at the corners of his almond-shaped, shiny, visionary’s eyes,
which had not changed since the day when old Peyrol’s gaze had met them
for the first time. A few white hairs on his tousled head and in the
thin beard alone had marked the passage of years, and you would have had
to look for them closely. Amongst the unchangeable rocks at the extreme
end of the peninsula, time seemed to have stood still and idle while the
group of people poised at that southernmost point of France had gone
about their ceaseless toil, winning bread and wine from a stony-hearted
earth.
The master of the farm, staring straight before him, passed before the
two men towards the door of the salle, which Peyrol had left open. He
leaned his fork against the wall before going in. The sound of a distant
bell, the bell of the village where years ago the returned rover had
watered his mule and had listened to the talk of the man with the dog,
came up faint and abrupt in the great stillness of the upper space. The
violent slamming of the salle door broke the silence between the two
gazers on the sea.
“Does that fellow never rest?” asked the young man in a low indifferent
voice which covered the delicate tinkling of the bell, and without
moving his head.
“Not on Sunday anyhow,” answered the rover in the same detached manner.
“What can you expect? The church bell is like poison to him. That
fellow, I verily believe, has been born a sans-culotte. Every ‘decadi’
he puts on his best clothes, sticks a red cap on his head and wanders
between the buildings like a lost soul in the light of day. A Jacobin,
if ever there was one.”
“Yes. There is hardly a hamlet in France where there isn’t a
sans-culotte or two. But some of them have managed to change their skins
if nothing else.”
“This one won’t change his skin, and as to his inside he never had
anything in him that could be moved. Aren’t there some people that
remember him in Toulon? It isn’t such a long time ago. And yet....”
Peyrol turned slightly towards the young man.... “And yet to look at
him....”
The officer nodded and for a moment his face wore a troubled expression
which did not escape the notice of Peyrol, who went on speaking easily:
“Some time ago, when the priests began to come back to the parishes, he,
that fellow”--Peyrol jerked his head in the direction of the salle
door--“would you believe it?--started for the village with a sabre
hanging to his side and his red cap on his head. He made for the church
door. What he wanted to do there I don’t know. It surely could not have
been to say the proper kind of prayers. Well, the people were very much
elated about their reopened church, and as he went along some woman
spied him out of a window and started the alarm. ‘Eh, there! look! The
Jacobin, the sans-culotte, the blood-drinker! Look at him.’ Out rushed
some of them, and a man or two that were working in their home patches
vaulted over the low walls. Pretty soon there was a crowd, mostly
women, each with the first thing she could snatch up--stick, kitchen
knife, anything. A few men with spades and cudgels joined them by the
water-trough. He didn’t quite like that. What could he do? He turned and
bolted up the hill like a hare. It takes some pluck to face a mob of
angry women. He ran along the cart track without looking behind him, and
they after him, yelling: ‘A mort! A mort le buveur de sang!’ He had been
a horror and an abomination to the people for years, what with one story
and another, and now they thought it was their chance. The priest over
in the presbytery hears the noise, comes to the door. One look was
enough for him. He is a fellow of about forty but a wiry, long-legged
beggar, and agile--what? He just tucked up his skirts and dashed out,
taking short cuts over the walls and leaping from boulder to boulder
like a blessed goat. I was up in my room when the noise reached me
there. I went to the window and saw the chase in full cry after him. I
was beginning to think the fool would fetch all those furies along with
him up here and that they would carry the house by boarding and do for
the lot of us, when the priest cut in just in the nick of time. He could
have tripped Scevola as easy as anything, but he lets him pass and
stands in front of his parishioners with his arms extended. That did it.
He saved the patron all right. What he could say to quieten them I don’t
know, but these were early days and they were very fond of their new
priest. He could have turned them round his little finger. I had my head
and shoulders out of the window--it was interesting enough. They would
have massacred all the accursed lot, as they used to call us down
there--and when I drew in, behold there was the patronne standing behind
me looking on too. You have been here often enough to know how she roams
about the grounds and about the house, without a sound. A leaf doesn’t
pose itself lighter on the ground than her feet do. Well, I suppose she
didn’t know that I was upstairs, and came into the room just in her way
of always looking for something that isn’t there, and noticing me with
my head stuck out, naturally came up to see what I was looking at. Her
face wasn’t any paler than usual but she was clawing the dress over her
chest with her ten fingers--like this. I was confounded. Before I could
find my tongue she just turned round and went out with no more sound
than a shadow.”
When Peyrol ceased, the ringing of the church bell went on faintly and
then stopped as abruptly as it had begun.
“Talking about her shadow,” said the young officer indolently, “I know
her shadow.”
Old Peyrol made a really pronounced movement. “What do you mean?” he
asked. “Where?”
“I have got only one window in the room where they put me to sleep last
night and I stood at it looking out. That’s what I am here for--to look
out, am I not? I woke up suddenly, and being awake I went to the window
and looked out.”
“One doesn’t see shadows in the air,” growled old Peyrol.
“No, but you see them on the ground, pretty black too when the moon is
full. It fell across this open space here from the corner of the
house.”
“The patronne,” exclaimed Peyrol in a low voice, “impossible!”
“Does the old woman that lives in the kitchen roam, do the village women
roam as far as this?” asked the officer composedly. “You ought to know
the habits of the people. It was a woman’s shadow. The moon being to the
west, it glided slanting from that corner of the house and glided back
again. I know her shadow when I see it.”
“Did you hear anything?” asked Peyrol after a moment of visible
hesitation.
“The window being open, I heard somebody snoring. It couldn’t have been
you, you are too high. Moreover, from the snoring,” he added grimly, “it
must have been somebody with a good conscience. Not like you, old
skimmer of the seas, because, you know, that’s what you are, for all
your gunner’s warrant.” He glanced out of the corner of his eyes at old
Peyrol. “What makes you look so worried?”
“She roams, that cannot be denied,” murmured Peyrol, with an uneasiness
which he did not attempt to conceal.
“Evidently. I know a shadow when I see it, and when I saw it, it did not
frighten me, not a quarter as much as the mere tale of it seems to have
frightened you. However, that sans-culotte friend of yours must be a
hard sleeper. Those purveyors of the guillotine all have a first-class
fireproof Republican conscience. I have seen them at work up north when
I was a boy running bare-foot in the gutters....”
“The fellow always sleeps in that room,” said Peyrol earnestly.
“But that’s neither here nor there,” went on the officer, “except that
it may be convenient for roaming shadows to hear his conscience taking
its ease.”
Peyrol, excited, lowered his voice forcibly. “Lieutenant,” he said, “if
I had not seen from the first what was in your heart I would have
contrived to get rid of you a long time ago in some way or other.”
The lieutenant glanced sideways again and Peyrol let his raised fist
fall heavily on his thigh. “I am old Peyrol and this place, as lonely as
a ship at sea, is like a ship to me and all in it are like shipmates.
Never mind the patron. What I want to know is whether you heard
anything? Any sound at all? Murmur, footstep?” A bitterly mocking smile
touched the lips of the young man.
“Not a fairy footstep. Could you hear the fall of a leaf--and with that
terrorist cur trumpeting right above my head?...” Without unfolding his
arms he turned towards Peyrol, who was looking at him anxiously.... “You
want to know, do you? Well, I will tell you what I heard and you can
make the best of it. I heard the sound of a stumble. It wasn’t a fairy
either that stubbed its toe. It was something in a heavy shoe. Then a
stone went rolling down the ravine in front of us interminably, then a
silence as of death. I didn’t see anything moving. The way the moon was
then the ravine was in black shadow. And I didn’t try to see.”
Peyrol, with his elbow on his knee, leaned his head in the palm of his
hand. The officer repeated through his clenched teeth: “Make the best of
it.”
Peyrol shook his head slightly. After having spoken, the young officer
leaned back against the wall, but next moment the report of a piece of
ordnance reached them as it were from below, travelling around the
rising ground to the left in the form of a dull thud followed by a
sighing sound that seemed to seek an issue amongst the stony ridges and
rocks near by.
“That’s the English corvette which has been dodging in and out of Hyères
Roads for the last week,” said the young officer, picking up his sword
hastily. He stood up and buckled the belt on, while Peyrol rose more
deliberately from the bench, and said:
“She can’t be where we saw her at anchor last night. That gun was near.
She must have crossed over. There has been enough wind for that at
various times during the night. But what could she be firing at down
there in the Petite Passe? We had better go and see.”
He strode off, followed by Peyrol. There was not a human being in sight
about the farm and not a sound of life except for the lowing of a cow
coming faintly from behind a wall. Peyrol kept close behind the quickly
moving officer who followed the footpath marked faintly on the stony
slope of the hill.
“That gun was not shotted,” he observed suddenly in a deep steady voice.
The officer glanced over his shoulder.
“You may be right. You haven’t been a gunner for nothing. Not shotted,
eh? Then a signal gun. But who to? We have been observing that corvette
now for days and we know she has no companion.”
He moved on, Peyrol following him on the awkward path without losing his
wind and arguing in a steady voice: “She has no companion but she may
have seen a friend at daylight this morning.”
“Bah!” retorted the officer without checking his pace. “You talk now
like a child or else you take me for one. How far could she have seen?
What view could she have had at daylight if she was making her way to
the Petite Passe where she is now? Why, the islands would have masked
for her two-thirds of the sea and just in the direction too where the
English inshore squadron is hovering below the horizon. Funny blockade
that! You can’t see a single English sail for days and days together,
and then when you least expect them they come down all in a crowd as if
ready to eat us alive. No, no! There was no wind to bring her up a
companion. But tell me, gunner, you who boast of knowing the bark of
every English piece, what sort of gun was it?”
Peyrol growled in answer.
“Why, a twelve. The heaviest she carries. She is only a corvette.”
“Well, then, it was fired as a recall for one of her boats somewhere out
of sight along the shore. With a coast like this, all points and bights,
there would be nothing very extraordinary in that, would there?”
“No,” said Peyrol, stepping out steadily. “What is extraordinary is that
she should have had a boat away at all.”
“You are right there.” The officer stopped suddenly. “Yes, it is really
remarkable that she should have sent a boat away. And there is no other
way to explain that gun.”
Peyrol’s face expressed no emotion of any sort.
“There is something there worth investigating,” continued the officer
with animation.
“If it is a matter of a boat,” Peyrol said without the slightest
excitement, “there can be nothing very deep in it. What could there be?
As likely as not they sent her inshore early in the morning with lines
to try to catch some fish for the captain’s breakfast. Why do you open
your eyes like this? Don’t you know the English? They have enough cheek
for anything.”
After uttering those words with a deliberation made venerable by his
white hair, Peyrol made the gesture of wiping his brow, which was barely
moist.
“Let us push on,” said the lieutenant abruptly.
“Why hurry like this?” argued Peyrol without moving. “Those heavy clogs
of mine are not adapted for scrambling on loose stones.”
“Aren’t they?” burst out the officer. “Well then, if you are tired you
can sit down and fan yourself with your hat. Good-bye.” And he strode
away before Peyrol could utter a word.
The path following the contour of the hill took a turn towards its
sea-face and very soon the lieutenant passed out of sight with startling
suddenness. Then his head reappeared for a moment, only his head, and
that too vanished suddenly. Peyrol remained perplexed. After gazing in
the direction in which the officer had disappeared, he looked down at
the farm buildings, now below him but not at a very great distance. He
could see distinctly the pigeons walking on the roof ridges. Somebody
was drawing water from the well in the middle of the yard. The patron,
no doubt; but that man, who at one time had the power to send so many
luckless persons to their death, did not count for old Peyrol. He had
even ceased to be an offence to his sight and a disturber of his
feelings. By himself he was nothing. He had never been anything but a
creature of the universal blood-lust of the time. The very doubts about
him had died out by now in old Peyrol’s breast. The fellow was so
insignificant that had Peyrol in a moment of particular attention
discovered that he cast no shadow, he would not have been surprised.
Below there he was reduced to the shape of a dwarf lugging a bucket away
from the well. But where was she? Peyrol asked himself, shading his eyes
with his hand. He knew that the patronne could not be very far away,
because he had a sight of her during the morning; but that was before he
had learned she had taken to roaming at night. His growing uneasiness
came suddenly to an end when, turning his eyes away from the
farm-buildings, where obviously she was not, he saw her appear, with
nothing but the sky full of light at her back, coming down round the
very turn of the path which had taken the lieutenant out of sight.
Peyrol moved briskly towards her. He wasn’t a man to lose time in idle
wonder, and his sabots did not seem to weigh heavy on his feet. The
fermière, whom the villagers down there spoke of as Arlette as though
she had been a little girl, but in a strange tone of shocked awe, walked
with her head drooping and her feet (as Peyrol used to say) touching the
ground as lightly as falling leaves. The clatter of the clogs made her
raise her black, clear eyes that had been smitten on the very verge of
womanhood by such sights of bloodshed and terror as to leave in her a
fear of looking steadily in any direction for long, lest she should see
coming through the empty air some mutilated vision of the dead. Peyrol
called it trying not to see something that was not there; and this
evasive yet frank mobility was so much a part of her being that the
steadiness with which she met his inquisitive glance surprised old
Peyrol for a moment. He asked without beating about the bush:
“Did he speak to you?”
She answered with something airy and provoking in her voice, which also
struck Peyrol as a novelty: “He never stopped. He passed by as though he
had not seen me”--and then they both looked away from each other.
“Now, what is it you took into your head to watch for at night?”
She did not expect that question. She hung her head and took a pleat of
her skirt between her fingers, embarrassed like a child.
“Why should I not,” she murmured in a low shy note, as if she had two
voices within her.
“What did Catherine say?”
“She was asleep, or perhaps only lying on her back with her eyes shut.”
“Does she do that?” asked Peyrol with incredulity.
“Yes.” Arlette gave Peyrol a queer, meaningless smile with which her
eyes had nothing to do. “Yes, she often does. I have noticed that
before. She lies there trembling under her blankets till I come back.”
“What drove you out last night?” Peyrol tried to catch her eyes, but
they eluded him in the usual way. And now her face looked as though it
couldn’t smile.
“My heart,” she said. For a moment Peyrol lost his tongue and even all
power of motion. The fermière having lowered her eyelids, all her life
seemed to have gone into her coral lips, vivid and without a quiver in
the perfection of their design, and Peyrol, giving up the conversation
with an upward fling of his arm, hurried up the path without looking
behind him. But once round the turn of the path, he approached the
lookout at an easier gait. It was a piece of smooth ground below the
summit of the hill. It had quite a pronounced slope, so that a short and
robust pine growing true out of the soil yet leaned well over the edge
of the sheer drop of some fifty feet or so. The first thing that
Peyrol’s eyes took in was the water of the Petite Passe with the
enormous shadow of the Porquerolles Island darkening more than half of
its width at this still early hour. He could not see the whole of it,
but on the part his glance embraced there was no ship of any kind. The
lieutenant, leaning with his chest along the inclined pine, addressed
him irritably.
“Squat! Do you think there are no glasses on board the Englishman?”
Peyrol obeyed without a word and for the space of a minute or so
presented the bizarre sight of a rather bulky peasant with venerable
white locks crawling on his hands and knees on a hillside for no visible
reason. When he got to the foot of the pine he raised himself on his
knees. The lieutenant, flattened against the inclined trunk and with a
pocket glass glued to his eye, growled angrily:
“You can see her now, can’t you?”
Peyrol in his kneeling position could see the ship now. She was less
than a quarter of a mile from him up the coast, almost within hailing
effort of his powerful voice. His unaided eyes could follow the
movements of the men on board like dark dots about her decks. She had
drifted so far within Cape Esterel that the low projecting mass of it
seemed to be in actual contact with her stern. Her unexpected nearness
made Peyrol draw a sharp breath through his teeth. The lieutenant
murmured, still keeping the glass to his eye:
“I can see the very epaulettes of the officers on the quarter-deck.”
V
As Peyrol and the lieutenant had surmised from the report of the gun,
the English ship which the evening before was lying in Hyères Roads had
got under way after dark. The light airs had taken her as far as the
Petite Passe in the early part of the night, and then had abandoned her
to the breathless moonlight in which, bereft of all motion, she looked
more like a white monument of stone dwarfed by the darkling masses of
land on either hand than a fabric famed for its swiftness in attack or
in flight.
Her captain was a man of about forty, with clean-shaven, full cheeks and
mobile thin lips which he had a trick of compressing mysteriously before
he spoke and sometimes also at the end of his speeches. He was alert in
his movements and nocturnal in his habits.
Directly he found that the calm had taken complete possession of the
night and was going to last for hours Captain Vincent assumed his
favourite attitude of leaning over the rail. It was then some time after
midnight and in the pervading stillness the moon, riding on a speckless
sky, seemed to pour her enchantment on an uninhabited planet. Captain
Vincent did not mind the moon very much. Of course it made his ship
visible from both shores of the Petite Passe. But after nearly a year of
constant service in command of the extreme lookout ship of Admiral
Nelson’s blockading fleet he knew the emplacement of almost every gun
of the shore defences. Where the breeze had left him he was safe from
the biggest gun of the few that were mounted on Porquerolles. On the
Giens side of the pass he knew for certain there was not even a popgun
mounted anywhere. His long familiarity with that part of the coast had
imbued him with the belief that he knew the habits of its population
thoroughly. The gleams of light in their houses went out very early, and
Captain Vincent felt convinced that they were all in their beds,
including the gunners of the batteries who belonged to the local
militia. Their interest in the movements of H.M.’s twenty-two gun sloop
_Amelia_ had grown stale by custom. She never interfered with their
private affairs, and allowed the small coasting craft to go to and fro
unmolested. They would have wondered if she had been more than two days
away. Captain Vincent used to say grimly that the Hyères Roadstead had
become like a second home to him.
For an hour or so Captain Vincent mused a bit on his real home, on
matters of service and other unrelated things, then getting into motion
in a very wide-awake manner, he superintended himself the dispatch of
that boat the existence of which had been acutely surmised by Lieutenant
Réal and was a matter of no doubt whatever to old Peyrol. As to her
mission, it had nothing to do with catching fish for the captain’s
breakfast. It was the captain’s own gig, a very fast pulling boat. She
was already alongside with her crew in her when the officer, who was
going in charge, was beckoned to by the captain. He had a cutlass at his
side and a brace of pistols in his belt, and there was a business-like
air about him that showed he had been on such service before.
“This calm will last a good many hours,” said the captain. “In this
tideless sea you are certain to find the ship very much where she is
now, but closer in shore. The attraction of the land--you know.”
“Yes, sir. The land does attract.”
“Yes. Well, she may be allowed to put her side against any of these
rocks. There would be no more danger than alongside a quay with a sea
like this. Just look at the water in the pass, Mr. Bolt. Like the floor
of a ballroom. Pull close along shore when you return. I’ll expect you
back at dawn.”
Captain Vincent paused suddenly. A doubt crossed his mind as to the
wisdom of this nocturnal expedition. The hammer-head of the peninsula
with its sea-face invisible from both sides of the coast was an ideal
spot for a secret landing. Its lonely character appealed to his
imagination, which in the first instance had been stimulated by a chance
remark of Mr. Bolt himself.
The fact was that the week before, when the Amelia was cruising off the
peninsula, Bolt, looking at the coast, mentioned that he knew that part
of it well; he had actually been ashore there a good many years ago,
while serving with Lord Howe’s fleet. He described the nature of the
path, the aspect of a little village on the reverse slope, and had much
to say about a certain farmhouse where he had been more than once, and
had even stayed for twenty-four hours at a time on more than one
occasion.
This had aroused Captain Vincent’s curiosity. He sent for Bolt and had
a long conversation with him. He listened with great interest to Bolt’s
story, how one day a man was seen from the deck of the ship in which
Bolt was serving then, waving a white sheet or tablecloth amongst the
rocks at the water’s edge. It might have been a trap; but, as the man
seemed alone and the shore was within range of the ship’s guns, a boat
was sent to take him off.
“And that, sir,” Bolt pursued impressively, “was, I verily believe, the
very first communication that Lord Howe had from the royalists in
Toulon.” Afterwards Bolt described to Captain Vincent the meetings of
the Toulon royalists with the officers of the fleet. From the back of
the farm he, Bolt himself, had often watched for hours the entrance of
the Toulon harbour on the lookout for the boat bringing over the
royalist emissaries. Then he would make an agreed signal to the advanced
squadron and some English officers would land on their side and meet the
Frenchmen at the farmhouse. It was as simple as that. The people of the
farmhouse, husband and wife, were well-to-do, good class altogether, and
staunch royalists. He had got to know them well.
Captain Vincent wondered whether the same people were still living
there. Bolt could see no reason why they shouldn’t be. It wasn’t more
than ten years ago, and they were by no means an old couple. As far as
he could make out, the farm was their own property. He, Bolt, knew only
very few French words at that time. It was much later, after he had been
made a prisoner and kept inland in France till the Peace of Amiens, that
he had picked up a smattering of the lingo. His captivity had done away
with his feeble chance of promotion, he could not help remarking. Bolt
was a master’s mate still.
Captain Vincent, in common with a good many officers of all ranks in
Lord Nelson’s fleet, had his misgivings about the system of distant
blockade from which the Admiral apparently would not depart. Yet one
could not blame Lord Nelson. Everybody in the fleet understood that what
was in his mind was the destruction of the enemy; and if the enemy was
closely blockaded he would never come out to be destroyed. On the other
hand it was clear that as things were conducted the French had too many
chances left them to slip out unobserved and vanish from all human
knowledge for months. Those possibilities were a constant worry to
Captain Vincent, who had thrown himself with the ardour of passion into
the special duty with which he was entrusted. Oh, for a pair of eyes
fastened night and day on the entrance of the harbour of Toulon! Oh, for
the power to look at the very state of French ships and into the very
secrets of French minds!
But he said nothing of this to Bolt. He only observed that the character
of the French Government was changed and that the minds of the royalist
people in the farmhouse might have changed too, since they had got back
the exercise of their religion. Bolt’s answer was that he had had a lot
to do with royalists, in his time, on board Lord Howe’s fleet, both
before and after Toulon was evacuated. All sorts, men and women, barbers
and noblemen, sailors and tradesmen; almost every kind of royalist one
could think of; and his opinion was that a royalist never changed. As to
the place itself, he only wished the captain had seen it. It was the
sort of spot that nothing could change. He made bold to say that it
would be just the same a hundred years hence.
The earnestness of his officer caused Captain Vincent to look hard at
him. He was a man of about his own age, but while Vincent was a
comparatively young captain, Bolt was an old master’s mate. Each
understood the other perfectly. Captain Vincent fidgeted for a while and
then observed abstractedly that he was not a man to put a noose round a
dog’s neck, let alone a good seaman’s.
This cryptic pronouncement caused no wonder to appear in Bolt’s
attentive gaze. He only became a little thoughtful before he said in the
same abstracted tone that an officer in uniform was not likely to be
hanged for a spy. The service was risky, of course. It was necessary,
for its success, that, assuming the same people were there, it should be
undertaken by a man well known to the inhabitants. Then he added that he
was certain of being recognized. And while he enlarged on the extremely
good terms he had been on with the owners of the farm, especially the
farmer’s wife, a comely motherly woman, who had been very kind to him,
and had all her wits about her, Captain Vincent, looking at the master’s
mate’s bushy whiskers, thought that these in themselves were enough to
ensure recognition. This impression was so strong that he had asked
point-blank: “You haven’t altered the growth of the hair on your face,
Mr. Bolt, since then?”
There was just a touch of indignation in Bolt’s negative reply; for he
was proud of his whiskers. He declared he was ready to take the most
desperate chances for the service of his king and his country.
Captain Vincent added: “For the sake of Lord Nelson, too.” One
understood well what his Lordship wished to bring about by that blockade
at sixty leagues off. He was talking to a sailor, and there was no need
to say any more. Did Bolt think that he could persuade those people to
conceal him in their house on that lonely shore end of the peninsula for
some considerable time? Bolt thought it was the easiest thing in the
world. He would simply go up there and renew the old acquaintance, but
he did not mean to do that in a reckless manner. It would have to be
done at night, when of course there would be no one about. He would land
just where he used to before, wrapped up in a Mediterranean sailor’s
cloak--he had one of his own--over his uniform, and simply go straight
to the door, at which he would knock. Ten to one the farmer himself
would come down to open it. He knew enough French by now, he hoped, to
persuade those people to conceal him in some room having a view in the
right direction; and there he would stick day after day on the watch,
taking a little exercise in the middle of the night, ready to live on
mere bread and water if necessary, so as not to arouse suspicion amongst
the farmhands. And who knows if, with the farmer’s help, he could not
get some news of what was going on actually within the port. Then from
time to time he could go down in the dead of night, signal to the ship
and make his report. Bolt expressed the hope that the _Amelia_ would
remain as much as possible in sight of the coast. It would cheer him up
to see her about. Captain Vincent naturally assented. He pointed out to
Bolt, however, that his post would become most important exactly when
the ship had been chased away or driven by the weather off her station,
as could very easily happen. “You would be then the eyes of Lord
Nelson’s fleet, Mr. Bolt--think of that. The actual eyes of Lord
Nelson’s fleet!”
After dispatching his officer, Captain Vincent spent the night on deck.
The break of day came at last, much paler than the moonlight which it
replaced. And still no boat. And again Captain Vincent asked himself if
he had not acted indiscreetly. Impenetrable, and looking as fresh as if
he had just come up on deck, he argued the point with himself till the
rising sun clearing the ridge on Porquerolles Island flashed its level
rays upon his ship with her dew-darkened sails and dripping rigging. He
roused himself then to tell his first lieutenant to get the boats out to
tow the ship away from the shore. The report of the gun he ordered to be
fired expressed simply his irritation. The _Amelia_, pointing towards
the middle of the Passe, was moving at a snail’s pace behind her string
of boats. Minutes passed. And then suddenly Captain Vincent perceived
his boat pulling back in shore according to orders. When nearly abreast
of the ship, she darted away, making for her side. Mr. Bolt clambered on
board, alone, ordering the gig to go ahead and help with the towing.
Captain Vincent, standing apart on the quarter-deck, received him with a
grimly questioning look.
Mr. Bolt’s first words were to the effect that he believed the
confounded spot to be bewitched. Then he glanced at the group of
officers on the other side of the quarter-deck. Captain Vincent led the
way to his cabin. There he turned and looked at his officer, who, with
an air of distraction, mumbled: “There are night-walkers there.”
“Come, Bolt, what the devil have you seen? Did you get near the house at
all?”
“I got within twenty yards of the door, sir,” said Bolt. And encouraged
by the captain’s much less ferocious--“Well?” began his tale. He did not
pull up to the path which he knew, but to a little bit of beach on which
he told his men to haul up the boat and wait for him. The beach was
concealed by a thick growth of bushes on the landward side and by some
rocks from the sea. Then he went to what he called the ravine, still
avoiding the path, so that as a matter of fact he made his way up on his
hands and knees mostly, very carefully and slowly amongst the loose
stones, till by holding on to a bush he brought his eyes on a level with
the piece of flat ground in front of the farmhouse.
The familiar aspect of the buildings, totally unchanged from the time
when he had played his part in what appeared as a most successful
operation at the beginning of the war, inspired Bolt with great
confidence in the success of his present enterprise, vague as it was,
but the great charm of which lay, no doubt, in mental associations with
his younger years. Nothing seemed easier than to stride across the forty
yards of open ground and rouse the farmer whom he remembered so well,
the well-to-do man, a grave, sagacious royalist in his humble way;
certainly, in Bolt’s view, no traitor to his country, and preserving so
well his dignity in ambiguous circumstances. To Bolt’s simple vision
neither that man nor his wife could have changed.
In this view of Arlette’s parents Bolt was influenced by the
consciousness of there having been no change in himself. He was the same
Jack Bolt, and everything around him was the same as if he had left the
spot only yesterday. Already he saw himself in the kitchen which he knew
so well, seated by the light of a single candle before a glass of wine
and talking his best French to that worthy farmer of sound principles.
The whole thing was as well as done. He imagined himself a secret inmate
of that building, closely confined indeed, but sustained by the possible
great results of his watchfulness, in many ways more comfortable than on
board the _Amelia_ and with the glorious consciousness that he was, in
Captain Vincent’s phrase, the actual physical eyes of the Fleet.
He didn’t, of course, talk of his private feelings to Captain Vincent.
All those thoughts and emotions were compressed in the space of not much
more than a minute or two while, holding on with one hand to his bush
and having got a good foothold for one of his feet, he indulged in that
pleasant anticipatory sense of success. In the old days the farmer’s
wife used to be a light sleeper. The farmhands which, he remembered,
lived in the village or were distributed in stables and outhouses, did
not give him any concern. He wouldn’t need to knock heavily. He pictured
to himself the farmer’s wife sitting up in bed, listening, then rousing
her husband, who, as likely as not, would take the gun standing against
the dresser downstairs and come to the door.
And then everything would be all right.... But perhaps ... yes! It was
just as likely the farmer would simply open the window and hold a
parley. That really was most likely. Naturally. In his place Bolt felt
he would do that very thing. Yes, that was what a man in a lonely house,
in the middle of the night, would do most naturally. And he imagined
himself whispering mysteriously his answers up the wall to the obvious
questions--“Ami”--“Bolt”--“Ouvrez-moi”--“vive le roi”--or things of that
sort. And in sequence to those vivid images it occurred to Bolt that the
best thing he could do would be to throw small stones against the window
shutter, the sort of sound most likely to rouse a light sleeper. He
wasn’t quite sure which window on the floor above the ground floor was
that of those people’s bedroom, but there were anyhow only three of
them. In a moment he would have sprung up from his foothold on to the
level if, raising his eyes for another look at the front of the house,
he had not perceived that one of the windows was already open. How he
could have failed to notice that before, he couldn’t explain.
He confessed to Captain Vincent in the course of his narrative that
“this open window, sir, checked me dead. In fact, sir, it shook my
confidence, for you know, sir, that no native of these parts would dream
of sleeping with his window open. It struck me that there was something
wrong there; and I remained where I was.”
That fascination of repose, of secretive friendliness, which houses
present at night, was gone. By the power of an open window, a black
square in the moon-lighted wall, the farmhouse took on the aspect of a
man-trap. Bolt assured Captain Vincent that the window would not have
stopped him; he would have gone on all the same, though with an
uncertain mind. But while he was thinking it out there glided without a
sound before his irresolute eyes from somewhere a white vision--a woman.
He could see her black hair flowing down her back. A woman whom anybody
would have been excused for taking for a ghost. “I won’t say that she
froze my blood, sir, but she made me cold all over for a moment. Lots of
people have seen ghosts, at least they say so, and I have an open mind
about that. She was a weird thing to look at in the moonlight. She did
not act like a sleep-walker either. If she had not come out of a grave,
then she had jumped out of bed. But when she stole back and hid herself
round the corner of the house I knew she was not a ghost. She could not
have seen me. There she stood in the black shadow watching for
something--or waiting for somebody,” added Bolt in a grim tone. “She
looked crazy,” he conceded charitably.
One thing was clear to him: there had been changes in that farmhouse
since his time. Bolt resented them, as if that time had been only last
week. The woman concealed round the corner remained in his full view,
watchful, as if only waiting for him to show himself in the open, to run
off screeching and rouse all the countryside. Bolt came quickly to the
conclusion that he must withdraw from the slope. On lowering himself
from his first position he had the misfortune to dislodge a stone. This
circumstance precipitated his retreat. In a very few minutes he found
himself by the shore. He paused to listen. Above him, up the ravine and
all round amongst the rocks, everything was perfectly still. He walked
along in the direction of his boat. There was nothing for it but to get
away quietly and perhaps....
“Yes, Mr. Bolt, I fear we shall have to give up our plan,” interrupted
Captain Vincent at that point. Bolt’s assent came reluctantly, and then
he braced himself to confess that this was not the worst. Before the
astonished face of Captain Vincent he hastened to blurt it out. He was
very sorry, he could in no way account for it, but--he had lost a man.
Captain Vincent seemed unable to believe his ears. “What do you say?
Lost a man out of my boat’s crew!” He was profoundly shocked. Bolt was
correspondingly distressed. He narrated that, shortly after he had left
them, the seamen had heard, or imagined they had heard, some faint and
peculiar noises somewhere within the cove. The coxswain sent one of the
men, the oldest of the boat’s crew, along the shore to ascertain whether
their boat hauled on the beach could be seen from the other side of the
cove. The man--it was Symons--departed crawling on his hands and knees
to make the circuit and, well--he had not returned. This was really the
reason why the boat was so late in getting back to the ship. Of course
Bolt did not like to give up the man. It was inconceivable that Symons
should have deserted. He had left his cutlass behind and was completely
unarmed, but had he been suddenly pounced upon he surely would have been
able to let out a yell that could have been heard all over the cove. But
till daybreak a profound stillness, in which it seemed a whisper could
have been heard for miles, had reigned over the coast. It was as if
Symons had been spirited away by some supernatural means, without a
scuffle, without a cry. For it was inconceivable that he should have
ventured inland and got captured there. It was equally inconceivable
that there should have been on that particular night men ready to
pounce upon Symons and knock him on the head so neatly as not to let him
give a groan even.
Captain Vincent said: “All this is very fantastical, Mr. Bolt,” and
compressed his lips firmly for a moment before he continued: “But not
much more than your woman. I suppose you did see something real....”
“I tell you, sir, she stood there in full moonlight for ten minutes
within a stone’s throw of me,” protested Bolt with a sort of
desperation. “She seemed to have jumped out of bed only to look at the
house. If she had a petticoat over her night-shift, that was all. Her
back was to me. When she moved away I could not make out her face
properly. Then she went to stand in the shadow of the house.”
“On the watch,” suggested Captain Vincent.
“Looked like it, sir,” confessed Bolt.
“So there must have been somebody about,” concluded Captain Vincent with
assurance.
Bolt murmured a reluctant, “Must have been.” He had expected to get into
enormous trouble over this affair and was much relieved by the captain’s
quiet attitude. “I hope, sir, you approve of my conduct in not
attempting to look for Symons at once?”
“Yes. You acted prudently by not advancing inland,” said the captain.
“I was afraid of spoiling our chances to carry out your plan, sir, by
disclosing our presence on shore. And that could not have been avoided.
Moreover, we were only five in all and not properly armed.”
“The plan has gone down before your night-walker, Mr. Bolt,” Captain
Vincent declared dryly. “But we must try to find out what has become of
our man if it can be done without risking too much.”
“By landing a large party this very next night we could surround the
house,” Bolt suggested. “If we find friends there, well and good. If
enemies, then we could carry off some of them on board for exchange
perhaps. I am almost sorry I did not go back and kidnap that
wench--whoever she was,” he added recklessly. “Ah! if it had only been a
man!”
“No doubt there was a man not very far off,” said Captain Vincent
equably. “That will do, Mr. Bolt. You had better go and get some rest
now.”
Bolt was glad to obey, for he was tired and hungry after his dismal
failure. What vexed him most was its absurdity. Captain Vincent, though
he too had passed a sleepless night, felt too restless to remain below.
He followed his officer on deck.