The Rover

and field, with clear dots of buildings enlivening the view. The sun threw a sort of halo around the ship. Recollecting himself, Peyrol left the room and shut the door quietly. Quietly too he descended the stairs from his garret. On the landing he underwent a short inward struggle, at the end of which he approached the door of Catherine’s room and opening it a little, put his head in. Across the whole width of it he saw Arlette fast asleep. Her aunt had thrown a light coverlet over her. Her low shoes stood at the foot of the bed. Her black hair lay loose on the pillow; and Peyrol’s gaze became arrested by the long eyelashes on her pale cheek. Suddenly he fancied she moved, and he withdrew his head sharply, pulling the door to. He listened for a moment as if tempted to open it again, but judging it too risky, continued on his way downstairs. At his reappearance in the kitchen Catherine turned sharply. She was dressed for the day, with a big white cap on her head, a black bodice and a brown skirt with ample folds. She had a pair of varnished sabots on her feet over her shoes.

“No signs of Scevola,” she said, advancing towards Peyrol. “And Michel, too, has not been here yet.”

Peyrol thought that if she had been only shorter, what with her black eyes and slightly curved nose she would have looked like a witch. But witches can read people’s thoughts, and he looked openly at Catherine with the pleasant conviction that she could not read his thoughts. He said:

“I took good care not to make any noise upstairs, Mademoiselle Catherine. When I am gone the house will be empty and quiet enough.”

She had a curious expression. She struck Peyrol suddenly as if she were lost in that kitchen in which she had reigned for many years. He continued:

“You will be alone all the morning.”

She seemed to be listening to some distant sound, and after Peyrol had added, “Everything is all right now,” she nodded, and after a moment said in a manner that for her was unexpectedly impulsive:

“Monsieur Peyrol, I am tired of life.”

He shrugged his shoulders and with somewhat sinister jocosity remarked:

“I will tell you what it is; you ought to have been married.”

She turned her back on him abruptly.

“No offence,” Peyrol excused himself in a tone of gloom rather than of apology. “It is no use to attach any importance to things. What is this life? Phew! Nobody can remember one-tenth of it. Here I am; and, you know, I would bet that if one of my old-time chums came along and saw me like this, here with you⁠—I mean one of those chums that stand up for a fellow in a scrimmage and look after him should he be hurt⁠—well, I bet,” he repeated, “he wouldn’t know me. He would say to himself, perhaps, ‘Hullo! here’s a comfortable married couple.’ ”

He paused. Catherine, with her back to him and calling him, not Monsieur, but Peyrol, tout court, remarked, not exactly with displeasure, but rather with an ominous accent, that this was no time for idle talk. Peyrol, however, continued, though his tone was very far from being that of idle talk:

“But you see, Mademoiselle Catherine, you were not like the others. You allowed yourself to be struck all of a heap, and at the same time you were too hard on yourself.”

Her long thin frame, bent low to work the bellows under the enormous overmantel, she assented: “Perhaps! We Escampobar women were always hard on ourselves.”

“That’s what I say. If you had had things happen to you which happened to me.⁠ ⁠…”

“But you men, you are different. It doesn’t matter what you do. You have got your own strength. You need not be hard on yourselves. You go from one thing to another thoughtlessly.”

He remained looking at her searchingly, with something like a hint of a smile on his shaven lips, but she turned away to the sink, where one of the women working about the farm had deposited a great pile of vegetables. She started on them with a broken-bladed knife, preserving her sibylline air, even in that homely occupation.

“It will be a good soup, I see, at noon today,” said the rover suddenly. He turned on his heels and went out through the salle. The whole world lay open to him, or at any rate the whole of the Mediterranean, viewed down the ravine between the two hills. The bell of the farm’s milch-cow, which had a talent for keeping herself invisible, reached him from the right, but he could not see as much as the tips of her horns, though he looked for them. He stepped out sturdily. He had not gone twenty yards down the ravine when another sound made him stand still as if changed into stone. It was a faint noise resembling very much the hollow rumble an empty farm-cart would make on a stony road, but Peyrol looked up at the sky, and though it was perfectly clear, he did not seem pleased with its aspect. He had a hill on each side of him and the placid cove below his feet. He muttered “H’m! Thunder at sunrise. It must be in the west. It only wanted that!” He feared it would first kill the little breeze there was and then knock the weather up altogether. For a moment all his faculties seemed paralysed by that faint sound. On that sea ruled by the gods of Olympus he might have been a pagan mariner subject to Jupiter’s caprices; but like a defiant pagan he shook his fist vaguely at space, which answered him by a short and threatening mutter. Then he swung on his way till he caught sight of the two mastheads of the tartane, when he stopped to listen. No sound of any sort reached him from there, and he went on his way