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``What did Catherine say?''
``She was asleep, or perhaps, only lying on her back with her eyes shut.''
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``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 fermiere 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 pocketglass glued to his eye, growled
angrily:
The Rover
CHAPTER IV
22
``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 quarterdeck.''
CHAPTER V
As Peyrol and the lieutenant had surmised from the report of the gun, the
English ship which the evening before was lying in Hyeres 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 cleanshaven, 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
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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 twentytwo gun sloop Amelia a 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
Hyeres 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
wideawake manner, he superintended himself the dispatch of that boat the
existence of which had been acutely surmised by Lieutenant Real 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 fastpulling 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
businesslike 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 inshore. The attraction of the landyou know.''
``Yes, sir. The land does attract.''
The Rover
CHAPTER V
23
``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 hammerhead of the peninsula with its seaface 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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]