“It was lucky for you,” he said, gazing upwards, “that Scevola hadn’t even one other like himself when he came here.”
“Yes,” she admitted. “I had to face him alone, from first to last. But can you see me between him and Arlette? In those days he raved terribly, but he was dazed and tired out. Afterwards I recovered myself and I could argue with him firmly. I used to say to him, ‘Look, she is so young, and she has no knowledge of herself.’ Why, for months the only thing she would say that one could understand was ‘Look how it spurts, look how it splashes!’ He talked to me of his republican virtue. He was not a profligate. He could wait. She was, he said, sacred to him, and things like that. He would walk up and down for hours talking of her and I would sit there listening to him with the key of the room the child was locked in, in my pocket. I temporized, and, as you say yourself, it was perhaps because he had no one at his back that he did not try to kill me, which he might have done any day. I temporized. And after all, why should he want to kill me? He told me more than once he was sure to have Arlette for his own. Many a time he made me shiver explaining why it must be so. She owed her life to him. Oh! that dreadful crazy life. You know he is one of those men that can be patient as far as women are concerned.”
Peyrol nodded understandingly. “Yes, some are like that. That kind is more impatient sometimes to spill blood. Still I think that your life was one long narrow escape, at least till I turned up here.”
“Things had settled down, somehow,” murmured Catherine. “But all the same I was glad when you appeared here, a grey-headed man, serious.”
“Grey hairs will come to any sort of man,” observed Peyrol acidly, “and you did not know me. You don’t know anything of me even now.”
“There have been Peyrols living less than half a day’s journey from here,” observed Catherine in a reminiscent tone.
“That’s all right,” said the rover in such a peculiar tone that she asked him sharply: “What’s the matter? Aren’t you one of them? Isn’t Peyrol your name?”
“I have had many names and this was one of them. So this name and my grey hair pleased you, Catherine? They gave you confidence in me, hein?”
“I wasn’t sorry to see you come. Scevola too, I believe. He heard that patriots were being hunted down, here and there, and he was growing quieter every day. You roused the child wonderfully.”
“And did that please Scevola too?”