THE ROVER & SUSPENSE (Napoleonic Novels). Джозеф Конрад
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dead already. Yes! but what is left of that life does not belong to me now.”
“Peyrol,” he said in such a piercing tone that even Scevola jerked his head up; but he made an effort to reduce his shrillness and went on speaking very carefully: “I have left a letter for the Secretary General at the Majorité to pay twenty-five hundred francs to Jean — you are Jean, are you not? — Peyrol, price of the tartane in which I sail. Is that right?”
“What did you do that for?” asked Peyrol with an extremely stony face. “To get me into trouble?”
“Don't be a fool, gunner, nobody remembers your, name. It is buried under a stack of blackened paper. I must ask you to go there and tell them that you have seen with your own eyes Lieutenant Réal sail away on his mission.”
The stoniness of Peyrol persisted but his eyes were full of fury. “Oh, yes, I see myself going there. Twenty-five hundred francs! Twenty-five hundred fiddlesticks.” His tone changed suddenly. “I heard some one say that you were an honest man, and I suppose this is a proof of it. Well, to the devil with your honesty.” He glared at the lieutenant and then thought: “He doesn't even pretend to listen to what I say” — and another sort of anger, partly contemptuous and with something of dim sympathy in it, replaced his downright fury. “Pah!” he said, spat over the side, and walking up to Réal with great deliberation, slapped him on the shoulder. The only effect of this proceeding was to make Réal look up at him without any expression whatever.
Peyrol then picked up the lieutenant's valise and carried it down into the cuddy. As he passed by, Citizen Scevola uttered the word “Citoyen” but it was only when he came back again that Peyrol condescended to say, “Well?”
“What are you going to do with me?” asked Scevola.
“You would not give me an account of how you came on board this tartane,” said Peyrol in a tone that sounded almost friendly, “therefore I need not tell you what I will do with you.”
A low muttering of thunder followed so close upon his words that it might have come out of Peyrol's own lips. The rover gazed uneasily at the sky. It was still clear overhead, and at the bottom of that little basin surrounded by rocks there was no view in any other direction; but even as he gazed there was a sort of flicker in the sunshine succeeded by a mighty but distant clap of thunder. For the next half hour Peyrol and Michel were busy ashore taking a long line from the tartane to the entrance of the little basin where they fastened the end of it to a bush. This was for the purpose of hauling the tartane out into the cove. Then they came aboard again. The bit of sky above their heads was still clear, but while walking with the hauling line near the cove Peyrol had got a glimpse of the edge of the cloud. The sun grew scorching all of a sudden, and in the stagnating air a mysterious change seemed to come over the quality and the colour of the light. Peyrol flung his cap on the deck, baring his head to the subtle menace of the breathless stillness of the air.
“Phew! Ca chauffe,' he muttered, rolling up the sleeves of his jacket. He wiped his forehead with his mighty forearm upon which a mermaid with an immensely long fishtail was tattooed. Perceiving the lieutenant's belted sword lying on the deck, he picked it up and without any ceremony threw it down the cabin stairs. As he was passing again near Scevola, the sans-culotte raised his voice.
“I believe you are one of those wretches corrupted by English gold,” he cried like one inspired. His shining eyes, his red cheeks, testified to the fire of patriotism burning in his breast, and he used that conventional phrase of revolutionary time, a time when, intoxicated with oratory, he used to run about dealing death to traitors of both sexes and all ages. But his denunciation was received in such profound silence that his own belief in it wavered. His words had sunk into an abysmal stillness and the next sound was Peyrol speaking to Réal.
“I am afraid you will get very wet, lieutenant, before long,” and then, looking at Réal, he thought with great conviction: “Wet! He wouldn't mind getting drowned.” Standing stock-still he fretted and fumed inwardly, wondering where precisely the English ship was by this time and where the devil that thunderstorm had got to: for the sky had become as mute as the oppressed earth. Réal asked:
“Is it not time to haul out, gunner?” And Peyrol said:
“There is not a breath of wind anywhere for miles.” He was gratified by the fairly loud mutter rolling apparently along the inland hills. Over the pool a little ragged cloud torn from the purple robe of the storm floated, arrested and thin like a bit of dark gauze.
Above at the farm Catherine had heard too the ominous mutter and came to the door of the salle. From there she could see the purple cloud itself, convoluted and solid, and its sinister shadow lying over the hills. The oncoming of the storm added to her sense of uneasiness at finding herself all alone in the house. Michel had not come up. She would have welcomed Michel, to whom she hardly ever spoke, simply as a person belonging to the usual order of things. She was not talkative, but somehow she would have liked somebody to speak to just for a moment. This cessation of all sound, voices or footsteps, around the buildings was not welcome; but looking at the cloud, she thought that there would be noise enough presently. However, stepping back into the kitchen, she was met by a sound that made her regret the oppressive silence, by its piercing and terrifying character; it was a shriek in the upper part of the house where, as far as she knew, there was only Arlette asleep. In her attempt to cross the kitchen to the foot of the stairs the weight of her accumulated years fell upon the old woman. She felt suddenly very feeble and hardly able to breathe. And all at once the thought, “Scevola! Was he murdering her up there?” paralyzed the last remnant of her physical powers. What else could it be? She fell, as if shot, into a chair under the first shock and found herself unable to move. Only her brain remained active, and she raised her hands to her eyes as if to shut out the image of the horrors upstairs. She heard nothing more from above. Arlette was dead. She thought that now it was her turn. While her body quailed before the brutal violence, her weary spirit longed ardently f or the end. Let him come! Let all this be over at last, with a blow on the head or a stab in the breast. She had not the courage to uncover her eyes. She waited. But after about a minute — it seemed to her interminable — she heard rapid footsteps overhead. Arlette was running here and there. Catherine uncovered her eyes and was about to rise when she heard at the top of the stairs the name of Peyrol shouted with a desperate accent. Then, again, after the shortest of pauses, the cry of: “Peyrol, Peyrol!” and then the sound of feet running downstairs. There was another shriek, “Peyrol!” just outside the door before it flew open. Who was pursuing her? Catherine managed to stand up. Steadying herself with one hand on the table she presented an undaunted front to her niece who ran into the kitchen with loose hair flying and the appearance of wildest distraction in her eyes.
The staircase door had slammed to behind her. Nobody was pursuing her; and Catherine, putting forth her lean brown arm, arrested Arlette's flight with such a jerk that the two women swung against each other. She seized her niece by the shoulders.
“What is this, in Heaven's name? Where are you rushing to?” she cried, and the other, as if suddenly exhausted, whispered:
“I woke up from an awful dream.”
The kitchen grew dark under the cloud that hung over the house now. There was a feeble flicker of lightning and a faint crash, far away.
The old woman gave her niece a little shake.
“Dreams are nothing,” she said. “You are awake now . . . .” And indeed Catherine thought that no dream could be so bad as the realities which kept hold of one through the long waking hours.
“They were killing him,” moaned Arlette, beginning to tremble and struggle in her aunt's arms. “I tell you they were killing him.”
“Be quiet. Were you dreaming of Peyrol?”
She became still in a moment and then whispered: “No. Eugène.”
She had seen Réal set upon by a mob of men and women, all dripping with blood, in a livid cold light, in front of a stretch of mere shells of houses with cracked walls and broken windows, and going down in the midst of a forest of raised arms brandishing sabres, clubs, knives, axes. There