“That’s what I was thinking,” said Peyrol half to himself, while Michel, who had good sea-legs, kept his balance to the movements of the craft without taking his eyes from the rover’s face.
“No,” Peyrol exclaimed suddenly, after a moment of meditation, “I could not leave you behind.” He extended his open palm towards Michel.
“Put your hand in there,” he said.
Michel hesitated for a moment before this extraordinary proposal. At last he did so, and Peyrol, holding the bereaved fisherman’s hand in a powerful grip, said:
“If I had gone away by myself, I would have left you marooned on this earth like a man thrown out to die on a desert island.” Some dim perception of the solemnity of the occasion seemed to enter Michel’s primitive brain. He connected Peyrol’s words with the sense of his own insignificant position at the tail of all mankind, and, timidly, he murmured with his clear, innocent glance unclouded, the fundamental axiom of his philosophy:
“Somebody must be last in this world.”
“Well, then, you will have to forgive me all that may happen between this and the hour of sunset.”
The tartane, obeying the helm, fell off before the wind, with her head to the eastward.
Peyrol murmured: “She has not forgotten how to walk the seas.” His unsubdued heart, heavy for so many days, had a moment of buoyancy—the illusion of immense freedom.
At that moment Réal, amazed at finding no tartane in the basin, was running madly towards the cove, where he was sure Peyrol must be waiting to give her up to him. He ran out on to the very rock on which Peyrol’s late prisoner had sat after his escape, too tired to care, yet cheered by the hope of liberty. But Réal was in a worse plight. He could see no shadowy form through the thin veil of rain which pitted the sheltered piece of water framed in the rocks. The little craft had been spirited away. Impossible! There must be something wrong with his eyes! Again the barren hillsides echoed the name of “Peyrol,” shouted with all the force of Réal’s lungs. He shouted it only once, and about five minutes afterwards appeared at the kitchen door, panting, streaming with water as if he had fought his way up from the bottom of the sea. In the tall-backed armchair Arlette lay, with her limbs relaxed, her head on Catherine’s arm, her face white as death. He saw her open her black eyes, enormous and as if not of this world; he saw old Catherine turn her head, heard a cry of surprise, and saw a sort of struggle beginning between the two women. He screamed at them like a madman: “Peyrol has betrayed me!” and in an instant, with a bang of the door, he was gone.