terminating the peninsula sank into a shallow pass. There were leaning pines on the skyline, and in the pass itself dull silvery green patches of olive orchards below a long yellow wall backed by dark cypresses, and the red roofs of buildings which seemed to belong to a farm.
“Will they lodge me there?” asked Peyrol.
“I don’t know. They will have plenty of room, that’s certain. There are no travellers here. But as for a place of refreshment, it used to be that. You have only got to walk in. If he isn’t there, the mistress is sure to be there to serve you. She belongs to the place. She was born on it. We know all about her.”
“What sort of woman is she?” asked Citizen Peyrol, who was very favourably impressed by the aspect of the place.
“Well, you are going there. You shall soon see. She is young.”
“And the husband?” asked Peyrol, who, looking{25} down into the other’s steady upward stare, detected a flicker in the brown, slightly faded eyes. “Why are you staring at me like this? I haven’t got a black skin, have I?”
{25}
The other smiled, showing in the thick pepper and salt growth on his face as sound a set of teeth as Citizen Peyrol himself. There was in his bearing something embarrassed, but not unfriendly, and he uttered a phrase from which Peyrol discovered that the man before him, the lonely hirsute, sunburnt and barelegged human being at his stirrup, nourished patriotic suspicions as to his character. And this seemed to him outrageous. He wanted to know in a severe voice whether he looked like a confounded landsman of any kind. He swore also without, however, losing any of the dignity of expression inherent in his type of features and in the very modelling of his flesh.
“For an aristocrat you don’t look like one, but neither do you look like a farmer or a pedlar or a patriot. You don’t look like anything that has been seen here for years and years and years. You look like one, I dare hardly say what. You might be a priest.”
Astonishment kept Peyrol perfectly quiet on his mule. “Do I dream?” he asked himself mentally. “You aren’t mad?” he asked aloud. “Do you know what you are talking about? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”
“All the same,” persisted the other innocently, “it is much less than ten years ago since I saw one of them of the sort they call Bishops, who
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