Peyrol did not like the sarcastic tone. “You have a nasty tongue,” he said, “with your damned trick of talking as if you were made of different clay.”
“No offence,” said the lieutenant, grave but a little puzzled. “Nobody will drag out that against you. It has been paid years ago to the Invalides’ fund. All this is buried and forgotten.”
Peyrol was grumbling and swearing to himself with such concentration that the lieutenant stopped and waited till he had finished.
“And there is no record of desertion or anything like that,” he continued then. “You stand there as disparu. I believe that after searching for you a little they came to the conclusion that you had come by your death somehow or other.”
“Did they? Well, perhaps old Peyrol is dead. At any rate he has buried himself here.” The rover suffered from great instability of feelings, for he passed in a flash from melancholy into fierceness. “And he was quiet enough till you came sniffing around this hole. More than once in my life I had occasion to wonder how soon the jackals would have a chance to dig up my carcass; but to have a naval officer come scratching round here was the last thing....” Again a change came over him. “What can you want here?” he whispered, suddenly depressed.
The lieutenant fell into the humour of that discourse. “I don’t want to disturb the dead,” he said, turning full to the rover, who, after his last words, had fixed his eyes on the ground. “I want to talk to the gunner Peyrol.”
Peyrol, without raising his eyes from the ground, growled: “He isn’t there. He is disparu. Go and look at the papers again. Vanished. Nobody here.”
“That,” said Lieutenant Réal in a conversational tone, “that is a lie. He was talking to me this morning on the hill-side as we were looking at the English ship. He knows all about her. He told me he spent nights making plans for her capture. He seemed to be a fellow with his heart in the right place. Un homme de cœur. You know him.”
Peyrol raised his big head slowly and looked at the lieutenant.
“Humph,” he grunted. A heavy, non-committal grunt. His old heart was stirred, but the tangle was such that he had to be on his guard with any man who wore epaulettes. His profile preserved the immobility of a head struck on a medal while he listened to the lieutenant assuring him that this time he had come to Escampobar on purpose to speak with the gunner Peyrol. That he had not done so before was because it was a very confidential matter. At this point the lieutenant stopped and Peyrol made no sign. Inwardly he was asking himself what the lieutenant was driving at. But the lieutenant seemed to have shifted his ground. His tone, too, was slightly different. More practical.