Still, Peyrol had broken through: and, presently, the peculiarities of all those people at the farm, each individual one of them, had entered through the breach.
Lieutenant Réal, on his back, closing his eyes to the glare of the sky, meditated on old Peyrol, while Peyrol himself, with his white head bare in the sunshine, seemed to be sitting by the side of a corpse. What in that man impressed Lieutenant Réal was the faculty of shrewd insight. The facts of Réal’s connection with the farmhouse on the peninsula were much as Peyrol had stated. First on specific duty about establishing a signal station, then, when that project had been given up, voluntary visits. Not belonging to any ship of the fleet but doing shore duty at the Arsenal, Lieutenant Réal had spent several periods of short leave at the farm, where indeed nobody could tell whether he had come on duty or on leave. He personally could not—or perhaps would not—tell even to himself why it was that he came there. He had been growing sick of his work. He had no place in the world to go to, and no one either. Was it Peyrol he was coming to see? A mute, strangely suspicious, defiant understanding had established itself imperceptibly between him and that lawless old man who might have been suspected to have come there only to die, if the whole robust personality of Peyrol with its quiet vitality had not been antagonistic to the notion of death. That rover behaved as though he had all the time in the world at his command.
Peyrol spoke suddenly, with his eyes fixed in front of him as if he were addressing the Island of Porquerolles, eight miles away.
“Yes—I know all her moves, though I must say that this trick of dodging close to our peninsula is something new.”
“H’m! Fish for the captain’s breakfast,” mumbled Réal without opening his eyes. “Where is she now?”
“In the middle of the Passe, busy hoisting in her boats. And still moving! That ship will keep her way as long as the flame of a candle on her deck will not stand upright.”
“That ship is a marvel.”
“She has been built by French shipwrights,” said old Peyrol bitterly.
This was the last sound for a long time. Then the lieutenant said in an indifferent tone: “You are very positive about that. How do you know?”
“I have been looking at her for a month, whatever name she might have had or whatever name the English call her by now. Did you ever see such a bow on an English-built ship?”