The thought that if he had remained at home he would have probably looked like that man crossed unbidden the mind of Peyrol. With that gravity from which he seldom departed he inquired if there were any inhabitants besides himself in the village. Then, to Peyrol's surprise, that destitute idler smiled pleasantly and said that the people were out looking after their bits of land.
There was enough of the peasant-born in Peyrol, still, to remark that he had seen no man, woman, or child, or four-footed beast for hours, and that he would hardly have thought that there was any land worth looking after anywhere around. But the other insisted. Well, they were working on it all the same, at least those that had any.
At the sound of the voices the dog got up with a strange air of being all backbone, and, approaching in dismal fidelity, stood with his nose close to his master's calves.
"And you," said Peyrol, "you have no land then?"
The man took his time to answer. "I have a boat."
Peyrol became interested when the man explained that his boat was on the salt pond, the large, deserted and opaque sheet of water lying dead between the two great bays of the living sea. Peyrol wondered aloud why any one should want a boat on it.
"There is fish there," said the man.
"And is the boat all your worldly goods?" asked Peyrol.
The flies buzzed, the mule hung its head, moving its ears and flapping its thin tail languidly.
"I have a sort of hut down by the lagoon and a net or two," the man confessed, as it were. Peyrol, looking down, completed the list by saying: "And this dog."
The man again took his time to say:
"He is company."
Peyrol sat as serious as a judge. "You haven't much to make a living of," he delivered himself at last. "However! . . . Is there no inn, café, or some place where one could put up for a day? I have heard up inland that there was some such place."
"I will show it to you," said the man, who then went back to where he had been sitting and picked up a large empty basket before he led the way. His dog followed with his head and tail low, and then came Peyrol dangling his heels against the sides of the intelligent mule, which seemed to know before-hand all that was going to happen. At the corner where the houses ended there stood an old wooden cross stuck into a square block of stone. The lonely boatman of the Lagoon of Pesquiers pointed in the direction of a branching path where the rises terminating the peninsula sank into a shallow pass. There were leaning pines on the skyline, and in the pass itself dull silvery green patches of olive orchards below a long yellow wall backed by dark cypresses, and the red roofs of buildings which seemed to belong to a farm.
"Will they lodge me there?" asked Peyrol.
"I don't know. They will have plenty of room, that's certain. There are no travellers here. But as for a place of refreshment, it used to be that. You have only got to walk in. If he isn't there, the mistress is sure to be there to serve you. She belongs to the place. She was born on it. We know all about her."
"What sort of woman is she?" asked Citizen Peyrol, who was very favourably impressed by the aspect of the place.
"Well, you are going there. You shall soon see. She is young."
"And the husband?" asked Peyrol, who, looking down into the other's steady upward stare, detected a flicker in the brown, slightly faded eyes. "Why are you staring at me like this? I haven't got a black skin, have I?"
The other smiled, showing in the thick pepper-and-salt growth on his face as sound a set of teeth as Citizen Peyrol himself. There was in his bearing something embarrassed, but not unfriendly, and, he uttered a phrase from which Peyrol discovered that the man before him, the lonely, hirsute, sunburnt and barelegged human being at his stirrup, nourished patriotic suspicions as to his character. And this seemed to him outrageous. He wanted to know in a severe voice whether he looked like a confounded landsman of any kind. He swore also without, however, losing any of the dignity of expression inherent in his type of features and in the very modelling of his flesh.
"For an aristocrat you don't look like one, but neither do you look like a farmer or a pedlar or a patriot. You don't look like anything that has been seen here for years and years and years. You look like one, I dare hardly say what. You might be a priest."
Astonishment kept Peyrol perfectly quiet on his mule. "Do I dream?" he asked himself mentally. "You aren't mad?" he asked aloud. "Do you know what you are talking about? Aren't you ashamed of yourself?"
"All the same," persisted the other innocently, "it is much less than ten years ago since I saw one of them of the sort they call bishops, who had a face exactly like yours."
Instinctively Peyrol passed his hand over his face. What could there be in it? Peyrol could not remember ever having seen a bishop in his life. The fellow stuck to his point, for he puckered his brow and murmured:
"Others too. . . . I remember perfectly. . . . It isn't so many years ago. Some of them skulk amongst the villages yet, for all the chasing they got from the patriots."
The sun blazed on the boulders and stones and bushes in the perfect stillness of the air. The mule, disregarding with republican austerity the neighbourhood of a stable within less than a hundred and twenty yards, dropped its head, and even its ears, and dozed as if in the middle of a desert. The dog, apparently changed into stone at his master's heels, seemed to be dozing too with his nose near the ground. Peyrol had fallen into a deep meditation, and the boatman of the lagoon awaited the solution of his doubts without eagerness and with something like a grin within his thick beard. Peyrol's face cleared. He had solved the problem, but there was a shade of vexation in his tone.
"Well, it can't be helped," he said. "I learned to shave from the English. I suppose that's what's the matter."
At the name of the English the boatman pricked up his ears.
"One can't tell where they are all gone to," he murmured. "Only three years ago they swarmed about this coast in their big ships. You saw nothing but them, and they were fighting all round Toulon on land. Then in a week or two, crac! – nobody! Cleared out devil knows where. But perhaps you would know."
"Oh, yes," said Peyrol, "I know all about the English, don't you worry your head."