“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. Officers 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.