Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (607 page)

Her heart had quietened down while she rested under the wall. Pulling out a long stalk of grass she twined it round her fingers absently. The veil of cloud had thickened over her head, early dusk had descended upon the earth, and she had not found out what had become of Ral. She jumped to her feet wildly. But directly she had done that she felt the need of self-control. It was with her usual light step that she approached the front of the house and for the first time in her life perceived how barren and sombre it looked when Ral was not about. She slipped in quietly through the door of the main building and ran upstairs. It was dark on the landing. She passed by the door leading into the room occupied by her aunt and herself. It had been her father and mother’s bedroom. The other big room was the lieutenant’s during his visits to Escampobar. Without even a rustle of her dress, like a shadow, she glided along the passage, turned the handle without noise and went in. After shutting the door behind her she listened. There was no sound in the house. Scevola was either already down in the yard or still lying open-eyed on his tumbled pallet in raging sulks about something. She had once accidentally caught, him at it, down on his face, one eye and cheek of which were buried in the pillow, the other eye glaring savagely, and had been scared away by a thick mutter: ``Keep off. Don’t approach me.’’ And all this had meant nothing to her then.

Having ascertained that the inside of the house was as still as the grave, Arlette walked across to the window, which when the lieutenant was occupying the room stood always open and with the shutter pushed right back against the wall. It was of course uncurtained, and as she came near to it Arlette caught sight of Peyrol coming down the hill on his return from the lookout. His white head gleamed like silver against the slope of the ground and by and by passed out of her sight, while her ear caught the sound of his footsteps below the window. They passed into the house, but she did not hear him come upstairs. He had gone into the kitchen. To Catherine. They would talk about her and Eugne. But what would they say? She was so new to life that everything appeared dangerous: talk, attitudes, glances. She felt frightened at the mere idea of silence between those two. It was possible. Suppose they didn’t say anything to each other. That would be awful.

Yet she remained calm like a sensible person, who knows that rushing about in excitement is not the way to meet unknown dangers. She swept her eyes over the room and saw the lieutenant’s valise in a corner. That was really what she had wanted to see. He wasn’t gone then. But it didn’t tell her, though she opened it, what had become of him. As to his return, she had no doubt whatever about that. He had always returned. She noticed particularly a large packet sewn up in sail-cloth and with three large red seals on the seam. It didn’t, however, arrest her thoughts. Those were still hovering about Catherine and Peyrol downstairs. How changed they were. Had they ever thought that she was mad? She became indignant. ``How could I have prevented that?’’ she asked herself with despair. She sat down on the edge of the bed in her usual attitude, her feet crossed, her hands lying in her lap. She felt on one of them the impress off Ral’s lips, soothing, reassuring like every certitude, but she was aware of a still remaining confusion in her mind, an indefinite weariness like the strain of an imperfect vision trying to discern shifting outlines, floating shapes, incomprehensible signs. She could not resist the temptation of resting her tired body, just for a little while.

She lay down on the very edge of the bed, the kissed hand tucked under her cheek. The faculty of thinking abandoned her altogether, but she remained open-eyed, wide awake. In that position, without hearing the slightest sound, she saw the door handle move down as far as it would go, perfectly noiseless, as though the lock had been oiled not long before. Her impulse was to leap right out into the middle of the room, but she restrained herself and only swung herself into a sitting posture. The bed had not creaked. She lowered her feet gently to the ground, and by the time when holding her breath she put her ear against the door, the handle had come back into position. She had detected no sound outside. Not the faintest. Nothing. It never occurred to her to doubt her own eyes, but the whole thing had been so noiseless that it could not have disturbed the lightest sleeper. She was sure that had she been lying on her other side, that is with her back to the door, she would have known nothing. It was some time before she walked away from the door and sat on a chair which stood near a heavy and much-carved table, an heirloom more appropriate to a chteau than to a farmhouse. The dust of many months covered its smooth oval surface of dark, finely grained wood.

``It must have been Scevola,’’ thought Arlette. It could have been no one else. What could he have wanted? She gave herself up to thought, but really she did not care. The absent Ral occupied all her mind. With an unconscious slowness her finger traced in the dust on the table the initials E A and achieved a circle round them. Then she jumped up, unlocked the door and went downstairs. In the kitchen, as she fully expected, she found Scevola with the others. Directly she appeared he got up and ran upstairs, but returned almost immediately looking as if he had seen a ghost, and when Peyrol asked him some insignificant question his lips and even his chin trembled before he could command his voice. He avoided looking anybody in the face. The others too seemed shy of meeting each other’s eyes, and the evening meal of the Escampobar seemed haunted by the absent lieutenant. Peyrol, besides, had his prisoner to think of. His existence presented a most interesting problem, and the proceedings of the English ship were another, closely connected with it and full of dangerous possibilities. Catherine’s black and ungleaming eyes seemed to have sunk deeper in their sockets, but her face wore its habitual severe aloofness of expression. Suddenly Scevola spoke as if in answer to some thought of his own.

``What has lost us was moderation.’’

Peyrol swallowed the piece of bread and butter which he had been masticating slowly, and asked:

``What are you alluding to, citoyen?’’

``I am alluding to the republic,’’ answered Scevola, in a more assured tone than usual. ``Moderation I say. We patriots held our hand too soon. All the children of the ci-devants and all the children of traitors should have been killed together with their fathers and mothers. Contempt for civic virtues and love of tyranny were inborn in them all. They grow up and trample on all the sacred principles. . . . The work of the Terror is undone!’’

``What do you propose to do about it?’’ growled Peyrol. ``No use declaiming here or anywhere for that matter. You wouldn’t find anybody to listen to you — -you cannibal,’’ he added in a good-humoured tone. Arlette, leaning her head on her left hand, was tracing with the forefinger of her right invisible initials on the table-cloth. Catherine, stooping to light a four-beaked oil lamp mounted on a brass pedestal, turned her finely carved face over her shoulder. The sans-culotte jumped up, flinging his arms about. His hair was tousled from his sleepless tumbling on his pallet. The unbuttoned sleeves of his shirt flapped against his thin hairy forearms. He no longer looked as though he had seen a ghost. He opened a wide black mouth, but Peyrol raised his finger at him calmly.

``No, no. The time when your own people up La Boyre way — -don’t they live up there? — -trembled at the idea of you coming to visit them with a lot of patriot scallywags at your back is past. You have nobody at your back; and if you started spouting like this at large, people would rise up and hunt you down like a mad dog.’’

Scevola, who had shut his mouth, glanced over his shoulder, and as if impressed by his unsupported state went out of the kitchen, reeling, like a man who had been drinking. He had drunk nothing but water. Peyrol looked thoughtfully at the door which the indignant sans-culotte had slammed after him. During the colloquy between the two men, Arlette had disappeared into the salle. Catherine, straightening her long back, put the oil lamp with its four smoky flames on the table. It lighted her face from below. Peyrol moved it slightly aside before he spoke.

``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?’’

``Before you came she never spoke to anybody unless first spoken to. She didn’t seem to care where she was. At the same time,’’ added Catherine after a pause, ``she didn’t care what happened to her either. Oh, I have had some heavy hours thinking it all over, in the daytime doing my work, and at night while I lay awake, listening to her breathing. And I growing older all the time, and, who knows, with my last hour ready to strike. I often thought that when I felt it coming I would speak to you as I am speaking to you now.’’

``Oh, you did think,’’ said Peyrol in an undertone. ``Because of my grey hairs, I suppose.’’

``Yes. And because you came from beyond the seas,’’ Catherine said with unbending mien and in an unflinching voice. ``Don’t you know that the first time Arlette saw you she spoke to you and that it was the first time I heard her speak of her own accord since she had been brought back by that man, and I had to wash her from head to foot before I put her into her mother’s bed.’’

``The first time,’’ repeated Peyrol.

``It was like a miracle happening,’’ said Catherine, ``and it was you that had done it.’’

``Then it must be that some Indian witch has given me the power,’’ muttered Peyrol, so low that Catherine could not hear the words. But she did not seem to care, and presently went on again:

``And the child took to you wonderfully. Some sentiment was aroused in her at last.’’

``Yes,’’ assented Peyrol grimly. ``She did take to me. She learned to talk to — -the old man.’’

``It’s something in you that seems to have opened her mind and unloosed her tongue,’’ said Catherine, speaking with a sort of regal composure down at Peyrol, like a chieftainess of a tribe. ``I often used to look from afar at you two talking and wonder what she . . .’’

``She talked like a child,’’ struck in Peyrol abruptly. ``And so you were going to speak to me before your last hour came. Why, you are not making ready to die yet?’’

``Listen, Peyrol. If anybody’s last hour is near it isn’t mine. You just look about you a little. It was time I spoke to you.’’

``Why, I am not going to kill anybody,’’ muttered Peyrol. ``You are getting strange ideas into your head.’’

``It is as I said,’’ insisted Catherine without animation. ``Death seems to cling to her skirts. She has been running with it madly. Let us keep her feet out of more human blood.’’

Peyrol, who had let his head fall on his breast, jerked it up suddenly. ``What on earth are you talking about?’’ he cried angrily. ``I don’t understand you at all.’’

``You have not seen the state she was in when I got her back into my hands,’’ remarked Catherine. . . . ``I suppose you know where the lieutenant is. What made him go off like that? Where did he go to?’’

``I know,’’ said Peyrol. ``And he may be back to-night.’’

``You know where he is! And of course you know why he has gone away and why he is coming back,’’ pronounced Catherine in an ominous voice. ``Well, you had better tell him that unless he has a pair of eyes at the back of his head he had better not return here — -not return at all; for if he does, nothing can save him from a treacherous blow.’’

``No man was ever safe from treachery,’’ opined Peyrol after a moment’s silence. ``I won’t pretend not to understand what you mean.’’

``You heard as well as I what Scevola said just before he went out. The lieutenant is the child of some ci-devant and Arlette of a man they called a traitor to his country. You can see yourself what was in his mind.’’

``He is a chicken-hearted spouter,’’ said Peyrol contemptuously, but it did not affect Catherine’s attitude of an old sibyl risen from the tripod to prophesy calmly atrocious disasters. ``It’s all his republicanism,’’ commented Peyrol with increased scorn. ``He has got a fit of it on.’’