acquired a sort of reputation, both openly, in the ports of the East and, secretly, amongst the Brothers of the Coast, that strange fraternity with something masonic and not a little piratical in its constitution. Round the Cape of Storms, which is also the Cape of Good Hope, the words Republic, Nation, Tyranny, Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, and the cult of the Supreme Being came floating on board ships from home: new cries and new ideas which did not upset the slowly developed intelligence of the gunner Peyrol. They seemed the invention of landsmen, of whom the seaman Peyrol knew very little—nothing, so to speak. Now after nearly fifty years of lawful and lawless sea-life Citizen Peyrol, at the yard gate of the roadside inn, looked at the late scene of his childhood. He looked at it without any animosity but a little puzzled as to his bearings amongst the features of the land. “Yes, it must be somewhere in that direction,” he thought vaguely. Decidedly he would go no further along the high road.... A few yards away the woman of the inn stood looking at him, impressed by the good clothes, the great shaven cheeks, the well-to-do air of that seaman; and suddenly Peyrol noticed her. With her anxious brown face, her grey locks, and her rustic appearance she might have been his mother, as he remembered her, only she wasn’t in rags.
{15}
“Hé! la mère,” hailed Peyrol. “Have you got a man to lend a hand with my chest into the house?”
He looked so prosperous and so authoritative that{16} she piped without hesitation in a thin voice, “Mais oui, citoyen. He will be here in a moment.”
{16}
In the dusk the clump of pines across the road looked very black against the quiet clear sky; and Citizen Peyrol gazed at the scene of his young misery with the greatest possible placidity. Here he was after nearly fifty years, and to look at things it seemed like yesterday. He felt for all this neither love nor resentment. He felt a little funny as it were, and the funniest thing was the thought which crossed his mind that he could indulge his fancy (if he had a mind to it) to buy up all this land to the furthermost field, away over there where the track lost itself sinking into the flats bordering the sea where the small rise at the end of the Giens peninsula had assumed the appearance of a black cloud.
“Tell me, my friend,” he said in his magisterial way to the farmhand with a tousled head of hair who was awaiting his good pleasure, “doesn’t this track lead to Almanarre?”
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