The Rover — Edition Insights

oudy idea of Peyrol’s past, though it need not necessarily have been more exact. In the various offices connected with the sea where his duties took him, the wretched scribes, and even some of the chiefs, looked very hard at him as he went in and out, dressed very neatly, and always with his cudgel, which he used to leave outside the door of private offices when called in for an interview with one or another of the “gold-laced lot.” Having, however, cut off his queue and got in touch with some prominent patriots of the Jacobin type, Peyrol cared little for people’s stares and whispers. The person that came nearest to trying his composure, was a certain naval captain with a patch over one eye and a very threadbare uniform coat, who was doing some administrative work at the Port Office. That officer, looking up from some papers, remarked brusquely, “As a matter of fact you have been the best part of your life skimming the seas, if the truth were known. You must have been a deserter from the Navy at one time, whatever you may call yourself now.”

There was not a quiver on the large cheeks of the gunner Peyrol.

“If there was anything of the sort it was in the time of kings and aristocrats,” he said steadily. “And now I have brought in a prize, and a service letter from Citizen Renaud, commanding in the Indian seas. I can also give you the names of good Republicans in this town who know my sentiments. Nobody can say I was ever anti-revolutionary in my life. I knocked about the Eastern seas for forty-five years--that’s true. But let me observe that it was the seamen who stayed at home that let the English into the Port of Toulon.” He paused for a moment and then added, “When one thinks of that, Citoyen Commandant, any little slips I and fellows of my kind may have made five thousand leagues from here and twenty years ago cannot have much importance in these times of equality and fraternity.”

“As to fraternity,” remarked the post-captain in the shabby coat, “the only one you are familiar with is the brotherhood of the coast, I should say.”

“Everybody in the Indian Ocean except milksops and youngsters had to be,” said the untroubled Citizen Peyrol. “And we practised republican principles long before a republic was thought of; for the Brothers of the Coast were all equal and elected their own chiefs.”

“They were an abominable lot of lawless ruffians,” remarked the officer venomously, leaning back in his chair. “You will not dare to deny that.”

Citizen Peyrol refused to take up a defensive attitude. He merely mentioned in a neutral tone that he had delivered his trust to the Port Office all right, and as to his character he had a certificate of civism from his section. He was a patriot and entitled to his discharge. After being dismissed by a nod he took up his cudgel outside the door and walked out of the building with the calmness of rectitude. His large face of the Roman type betrayed nothing to the wretched quill-drivers, who whispered on his passage. As he went along the streets, he looked as usual everybody in the eye; but that very same evening he vanished from Toulon. It wasn’t that he was afraid of anything. His mind was as calm as the natural set of his florid face. Nobody could know what his forty years or more of sea life had been, unless he told them himself. And of that he didn’t mean to tell more than what he had told the inquisitive captain with the patch over one eye. But he didn’t want any bother for certain other reasons; and more than anything else he didn’t want to be sent perhaps to serve in the fleet now fitting out in Toulon. So at dusk he passed through the gate on the road to Fréjus in a high two-wheeled cart belonging to a well-known farmer whose habitation lay that way. His personal belongings were brought down and piled up on the tailboard of the cart by some ragamuffin patriots whom he engaged in the street for that purpose. The only indiscretion he committed was to pay them for their trouble with a large handful of assignats. From such a prosperous seaman, however, this generosity was not so very compromising. He himself got into the cart over the wheel, with such slow and ponderous movements, that the friendly farmer felt called upon to remark: “Ah, we are not so young as we used to be--you and I.” “I have also an awkward wound,” said Citizen Peyrol sitting down heavily.