Many years afterwards, one fine evening, Monsieur and Madame Réal sitting on the bench outside the salle (the house had not been altered at all outside except that it was now kept whitewashed), began to talk of that episode and of the man who, coming from the seas, had crossed their lives to disappear at sea again.
"How did he get all that lot of gold?" wondered Madame Réal innocently. "He could not possibly want it; and, Eugène, why should he have put it down there?"
"That, ma chère amie," said Réal, "is not an easy question to answer. Men and women are not so simple as they seem. Even you, fermière (he used to give his wife that name jocularly, sometimes), are not so simple as some people would take you to be. I think that if Peyrol were here he could not perhaps answer your question himself."
And they went on, reminding each other in short phrases separated by long silences, of his peculiarities of person and behaviour, when above the slope leading down to Madrague, there appeared first, the pointed ears, and then the whole body of a very diminutive donkey of a light grey colour with dark points. Two pieces of wood, strangely shaped, projected on each side of his body as far as his head, like very long shafts of a cart. But the donkey dragged no cart after him. He was carrying on his back on a small pack saddle the torso of a man who did not seem to have any legs. The little animal, beautifully groomed and with an intelligent and even impudent physiognomy, stopped in front of Monsieur and Madame Réal. The man, balancing himself cleverly on the pack saddle with his withered legs crossed in front of him, slipped off, disengaged his crutches from each side of the donkey smartly, propped himself on them, and with his open palm gave the animal a resounding thwack which sent it trotting into the yard. The cripple of the Madrague in his quality of Peyrol's friend (for the rover had often talked of him both to the women and to Lieutenant Réal with great appreciation – "C'est un homme, ça") had become a member of the Escampobar community. His employment was to run about the country on errands, most unfit, one would think, for a man without legs. But the donkey did all the walking while the cripple supplied the sharp wits and an unfailing memory. The poor fellow, snatching off his hat and holding it with one hand alongside his right crutch, approached to render his account of the day in the simple words: "Everything has been done as you ordered, madame"; then lingered, a privileged servant, familiar but respectful, attractive with his soft eyes, long face, and his pained smile.
"We were just talking of Peyrol," remarked Captain Réal.
"Ah, one could talk a long time of him," said the cripple. "He told me once that if I had been complete – with legs like everybody else, I suppose he meant – I would have made a good comrade away there in the distant seas. He had a great heart."
"Yes," murmured Madame Réal thoughtfully. Then turning to her husband, she asked: "What sort of man was he really, Eugène?" Captain Réal remained silent. "Did you ever ask yourself that question?" she insisted.
"Yes," said Réal. "But the only certain thing we can say of him is that he was not a bad Frenchman."
"Everything's in that," murmured the cripple, with fervent conviction in the silence that fell upon Réal's words and Arlette's faint sigh of memory.
The blue level of the Mediterranean, the charmer and the deceiver of audacious men, kept the secret of its fascination – hugged to its calm breast the victims of all the wars, calamities and tempests of its history, under the marvellous purity of the sunset sky. A few rosy clouds floated high up over the Esterel range. The breath of the evening breeze came to cool the heated rocks of Escampobar; and the mulberry tree, the only big tree on the head of the peninsula, standing like a sentinel at the gate of the yard, sighed faintly in a shudder of all its leaves, as if regretting the Brother of the Coast, the man of dark deeds, but of large heart, who often at noonday would lie down to sleep under its shade.
THE END