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The Isle of Unrest

by Henry Seton Merriman · English · Gutenberg #8873 · 434,287 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Isle of Unrest

Author: Henry Seton Merriman


        
Release date: September 1, 2005 [eBook #8873]
                Most recently updated: March 12, 2018

Language: English

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THE ISLE OF UNREST


By Henry Seton Merriman



TO LUCASTA


GOING TO THE WARS

               Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind
               That from the nunnery
               Of thy chaste breast, and quiet mind,
               To war and arms I fly.

               True: a new mistress now I chase,
               The first foe in the field;
               And with a stronger faith embrace
               A sword, a horse, a shield.

               Yet this inconstancy is such
               As you too shall adore;
               I could not love thee, dear, so much
               Lov'd I not honour more.

               RICHARD LOVELACE.



CONTENTS


CHAPTER

       I. THE MOVING FINGER
      II. CHEZ CLÉMENT
     III. A BY-PATH
      IV. A TOSS-UP
       V. IN THE RUE DU CHERCHE-MIDI
      VI. NEIGHBOURS
     VII. JOURNEY'S END
    VIII.  AT VASSELOT
      IX. THE PROMISED LAND
       X. THUS FAR
      XI. BY SURPRISE
     XII. A SUMMONS
    XIII. WAR
     XIV. GOSSIP
      XV. WAR
     XVI. A MASTERFUL MAN
    XVII. WITHOUT DRUM OR TRUMPET
   XVIII. A WOMAN OF ACTION
     XIX. THE SEARCH
      XX. WOUNDED
     XXI. FOR FRANCE
    XXII. IN THE MACQUIS
   XXIII. AN UNDERSTANDING
    XXIV. “CE QUE FEMME VEUT”
      XXV. ON THE GREAT ROAD
    XXVI. THE END OF THE JOURNEY
   XXVII. THE ABBÉ'S SALAD
  XXVIII. GOLD
    XXIX. A BALANCED ACCOUNT
     XXX. THE BEGINNING AND THE END




THE ISLE OF UNREST




CHAPTER I.


THE MOVING FINGER.

     “The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
     Moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit
     Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
     Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.”


The afternoon sun was lowering towards a heavy bank of clouds hanging
still and sullen over the Mediterranean. A mistral was blowing. The last
yellow rays shone fiercely upon the towering coast of Corsica, and the
windows of the village of Olmeta glittered like gold.

There are two Olmetas in Corsica, both in the north, both on the west
coast, both perched high like an eagle's nest, both looking down upon
those lashed waters of the Mediterranean, which are not the waters that
poets sing of, for they are as often white as they are blue; they are
seldom glassy except in the height of summer and sailors tell that they
are as treacherous as any waters of the earth. Neither aneroid nor
weather-wisdom may, as a matter of fact, tell when a mistral will arise,
how it will blow, how veer, how drop and rise, and drop again. For it
will blow one day beneath a cloudless sky, lashing the whole sea white
like milk, and blow harder to-morrow under racing clouds.

The great chestnut trees in and around Olmeta groaned and strained in the
grip of their lifelong foe. The small door, the tiny windows, of every
house were rigorously closed. The whole place had a wind-swept air
despite the heavy foliage. Even the roads, and notably the broad “Place,”
had been swept clean and dustless. And in the middle of the “Place,”
between the fountain and the church steps, a man lay dead upon his face.

It is as well to state here, once for all, that we are dealing with
Olmeta-di-Tuda, and not that other Olmeta--the virtuous, di Capocorso, in
fact, which would shudder at the thought of a dead man lying on its
“Place,” before the windows of the very Mairie, under the shadow of the
church. For Cap Corse is the good boy of Corsica, where men think
sorrowfully of the wilder communes to the south, and raise their eyebrows
at the very mention of Corte and Sartene--where, at all events, the women
have for husbands, men--and not degenerate Pisan vine-snippers.

It was not so long ago either. For the man might have been alive to-day,
though he would have been old and bent no doubt; for he was a thick-set
man, and must have been strong. He had, indeed, carried his lead up from
the road that runs by the Guadelle river. Was he not to be traced all the
way up the short cut through the olive terraces by one bloody footprint
at regular intervals? You could track his passage across the “Place,”
 towards the fountain of which he had fallen short like a poisoned rat
that tries to reach water and fails.

He lay quite alone, still grasping the gun which he had never laid aside
since boyhood. No one went to him; no one had attempted to help him. He
lay as he had fallen, with a thin stream of blood running slowly from one
trouser-leg. For this was Corsican work--that is to say, dirty work--from
behind a rock, in the back, at close range, without warning or mercy, as
honest men would be ashamed to shoot the merest beast of the forest. It
was as likely as not a charge of buck-shot low down in the body, leaving
the rest to hemorrhage or gangrene.

All Olmeta knew of it, and every man took care that it should be no
business of his. Several had approached, pipe in mouth, and looked at the
dead man without comment; but all had gone away again, idly,
indifferently. For in this the most beautiful of the islands, human life
is held cheaper than in any land of Europe.

Some one, it was understood, had gone to tell the gendarmes down at St.
Florent. There was no need to send and tell his wife--half a dozen women
were racing through the olive groves to get the first taste of that.
Perhaps some one had gone towards Oletta to meet the Abbé Susini, whose
business in a measure this must be.

The sun suddenly dipped behind the heavy bank of clouds and the mountains
darkened. Although it lies in the very centre of the Mediterranean,
Corsica is a gloomy land, and the summits of her high mountains are more
often covered than clear. It is a land of silence and brooding quiet. The
women are seldom gay; the men, in their heavy clothes of dark corduroy,
have little to say for themselves. Some of them were standing now in the
shadow of the great trees, smoking their pipes in silence, and looking
with a studied indifference at nothing. Each was prepared to swear before
a jury at the Bastia assizes that he knew nothing of the “accident,” as
it is here called, to Pietro Andrei, and had not seen him crawl up to
Olmeta to die. Indeed, Pietro Andrei's death seemed to be nobody's
business, though we are told that not so much as a sparrow may fall
unheeded.

The Abbé Susini was coming now--a little fiery man, with the walk of one
who was slightly bow-legged, though his cassock naturally concealed this
defect. He was small and not too broad, with a narrow face and clean,
straight features--something of the Spaniard, something of the Greek,
nothing Italian, nothing French. In a word, this was a Corsican, which is
to say that he was different from any other European race, and would, as
sure as there is corn in Egypt, be overbearing, masterful, impossible. He
was, of course, clean shaven, as brown as old oak, with little flashing
black eyes. His cassock was a good one, and his hat, though dusty,
shapely and new. But his whole bearing threw, as it were, into the
observer's face the suggestion that the habit does not make the priest.

He came forward without undue haste, and displayed little surprise and no
horror.

“Quite like old times,” he said to himself, remembering the days of Louis
Philippe. He knelt down beside the dead man, and perhaps the attitude
reminded him of his calling; for he fell to praying, and made the gesture
of the cross over Andrei's head. Then suddenly he leapt to his feet, and
shook his lean fist out towards the valley and St. Florent, as if he knew
whence this trouble came.

“Provided they would keep their work in their own commune,” he cried,
“instead of bringing disgrace on a parish that has not had the gendarmes
this--this--”

“Three days,” added one of the bystanders, who had drawn near. And he
said it with a certain pride, as of one well pleased to belong to a
virtuous community.

But the priest was not listening. He had already turned aside in his
quick, jerky way; for he was a comparatively young man. He was looking
through the olives towards the south.

“It is the women,” he said, and his face suddenly hardened. He was
impulsive, it appeared--quick to feel for others, fiery in his anger,
hasty in his judgment.

From the direction in which he and the bystanders looked, came the hum of
many voices, and the high, incessant shrieks of one who seemed demented.
Presently a confused procession appeared from the direction of the south,
hurrying through the narrow street now called the Rue Carnot. It was
headed by a woman, who led a little child, running and stumbling as he
ran. At her heels a number of women hurried, confusedly shouting,
moaning, and wailing. The men stood waiting for them in dead silence--a
characteristic scene. The leading woman seemed to be superior to her
neighbours, for she wore a black silk handkerchief on her head instead of
a white or coloured cotton. It is almost a mantilla, and marks as clear a
social distinction in Corsica as does that head-dress in Spain. She
dragged at the child, and scarce turned her head when he fell and
scrambled as best he could to his feet. He laughed and crowed with
delight, remembering last year's carnival with that startling,
photographic memory of early childhood which never forgets.

At every few steps the woman gave a shriek as if she were suffering some
intermittent agony which caught her at regular intervals. At the sight of
the crowd she gave a quick cry of despair, and ran forward, leaving her
child sprawling on the road. She knelt by the dead man's side with shriek
after shriek, and seemed to lose all control over herself, for she gave
way to those strange gestures of despair of which many read in novels and
a few in the Scriptures, and which come by instinct to those who have no
reading at all. She dragged the handkerchief from her head, and threw it
over her face. She beat her breast. She beat the very ground with her
clenched hands. Her little boy, having gathered his belongings together
and dusted his cotton frock, now came forward, and stood watching her
with his fingers at his mouth. He took it to be a game which he did not
understand; as indeed it was--the game of life.

The priest scratched his chin with his forefinger, which was probably a
habit with him when puzzled, and stood looking down out of the corner of
his eyes at the ground.

It was he, however, who moved first, and, stooping, loosed the clenched
fingers round the gun. It was a double-barrelled gun, at full cock, and
every man in the little crowd assembled carried one like it. To this day,
if one meets a man, even in the streets of Corte or Ajaccio, who carries
no gun, it may be presumed that it is only because he pins greater faith
on a revolver.

Neither hammer had fallen, and the abbé gave a little nod. It was, it
seemed, the usual thing to make quite sure before shooting, so that there
might be no unnecessary waste of powder or risk of reprisal. The woman
looked at the gun, too, and knew the meaning of the raised hammers.

She leapt to her feet, and looked round at the sullen faces.

“And some of you know who did it,” she said; “and you will help the
murderer when he goes to the macquis, and take him food, and tell him
when the gendarmes are hunting him.”

She waved her hand fiercely towards the mountains, which loomed, range
behind range, dark and forbidding to the south, towards Calvi and Corte.
But the men only shrugged their shoulders; for the forest and the
mountain brushwood were no longer the refuge they used to be in this the
last year of the iron rule of Napoleon III, who, whether he possessed or
not the Corsican blood that his foes deny him, knew, at all events, how
to rule Corsica better than any man before or since.

“No, no,” said the priest, soothingly. “Those days are gone. He will be
taken, and justice will be done.”

But he spoke without conviction, almost as if he had no faith in this
vaunted regeneration of a people whose history is a story of endless
strife--as if he could see with a prophetic eye thirty years into the
future, down to the present day, when the last state of that land is
worse than the first.

“Justice!” cried the woman. “There is no justice in Corsica! What had
Pietro done that he should lie there? Only his duty--only that for which
he was paid. He was the Perucca's agent, and because he made the idlers
pay their rent, they threatened him. Because he put up fences, they
raised their guns to him. Because he stopped their thieving and their
lawlessness, they shoot him. He drove their cattle from the fields
because they were Perucca's fields, and he was paid to watch his master's
interests. But Perucca they dare not touch, because his clan is large,
and would hunt the murderer down. If he was caught, the Peruccas would
make sure of the jury--ay! And of the judge at Bastia--but Pietro is not
of Corsica; he has no friends and no clan, so justice is not for him.”

She knelt down again as she spoke and laid her hand on her dead husband's
back, but she made no attempt to move him. For although Pietro Andrei was
an Italian, his wife was Corsican--a woman of Bonifacio, that grim town
on a rock so often besieged and never yet taken by a fair fight. She had
been brought up in, as it were, an atmosphere of conventional
lawlessness, and knew that it is well not to touch a dead man till the
gendarmes have seen him, but to send a child or an old woman to the
gendarmerie, and then to stand aloof and know nothing; and feign
stupidity; so that the officials, when they arrive, may find the whole
village at work in the fields or sitting in their homes, while the dead,
who can tell no tales, has suddenly few friends and no enemies.

Then Andrei's widow rose slowly to her feet. Her face was composed now
and set. She arranged the black silk handkerchief on her head, and set
her dress in order. She was suddenly calm and quiet. “But see,” she said,
looking round into eyes that failed to meet her own, “in this country
each man must execute his own justice. It has always been so, and it will
be so, so long as there are any Corsicans left. And if there is no man
left, then the women must do it.”

She tied her apron tighter, as if about to undertake some hard domestic
duty, and brushed the dust from her black dress.

“Come here,” she said, turning to the child, and lapsing into the soft
dialect of the south and east--“come here, thou child of Pietro Andrei.”

The child came forward. He was probably two years old, and understood
nothing that was passing.

“See here, you of Olmeta,” she said composedly; and, stooping down, she
dipped her finger in the pool of blood that had collected in the dust.
“See here--and here.”

As she spoke she hastily smeared the blood over the child's face and
dragged him away from the priest, who had stepped forward.

“No, no,” he protested. “Those times are past.”

“Past!” said the woman, with a flash of fury. “All the country knows that
your own mother did it to you at Sartene, where you come from.”

The abbé made no answer, but, taking the child by the arm, dragged him
gently away from his mother. With his other hand he sought in his pocket
for a handkerchief. But he was a lone man, without a housekeeper, and the
handkerchief was missing. The child looked from one to the other,
laughing uncertainly, with his grimly decorated face.

Then the priest stooped, and with the skirt of his cassock wiped the
child's face.

“There,” he said to the woman, “take him home, for I hear the gendarmes
coming.”

Indeed, the trotting of horses and the clank of the long swinging sabres
could be heard on the road below the village, and one by one the
onlookers dropped away, leaving the Abbé Susini alone at the foot of the
church steps.




CHAPTER II.


CHEZ CLÉMENT.


     “Comme on est heureux quand on sait ce qu'on veut!”


It was the dinner hour at the Hotel Clément at Bastia; and the event was
of greater importance than the outward appearance of the house would
seem to promise. For there is no promise at all about the house on the
left-hand side of Bastia's one street, the Boulevard du Palais, which
bears, as its only sign, a battered lamp with the word “Clément” printed
across it. The ground floor is merely a rope and hemp warehouse. A small
Corsican donkey, no bigger than a Newfoundland dog, lives in the
basement, and passes many of his waking hours in what may be termed the
entrance hall of the hotel, appearing to consider himself in some sort a
concierge. The upper floors of the huge Genoese house are let out in
large or small apartments to mysterious families, of which the younger
members are always to be met carrying jugs carefully up and down the
greasy, common staircase.

The first floor is the Hotel Clément, or, to be more correct, one is
“chez Clément” on the first floor.

“You stay with Clément,” will be the natural remark of any on board the
Marseilles or Leghorn steamer, on being told that the traveller
disembarks at Bastia.

“We shall meet to-night chez Clément,” the officers say to each other on
leaving the parade ground at four o'clock.

“Déjeuner chez Clément,” is the usual ending to a notice of a marriage,
or a first communion, in the _Petit Bastiais_, that greatest of all
foolscap-size journals.

It is comforting to reflect, in these times of hurried changes, that the
traveller to Bastia may still find himself chez Clément--may still have
to kick at the closed door of the first-floor flat, and find that door
opened by Clément himself, always affable, always gentlemanly, with the
same crumbs strewed carelessly down the same waistcoat, or, if it is
evening time, in his spotless cook's dress. One may be sure of the same
grave welcome, and the easy transition from grave to gay, the smiling,
grand manner of conducting the guest to one of those vague and darksome
bedrooms, where the jug and the basin never match, where the floor is of
red tiles, with a piece of uncertain carpet sliding hither and thither,
with the shutters always shut, and the mustiness of the middle ages
hanging heavy in the air. For Bastia has not changed, and never will. And
it is not only to be fervently hoped, but seems likely, that Clément will
never grow old, and never die, but continue to live and demonstrate the
startling fact that one may be born and live all one's life in a remote,
forgotten town, and still be a man of the world.

The soup had been served precisely at six, and the four artillery
officers were already seated at the square table near the fireplace,
which was and is still exclusively the artillery table. The other
_habitués_ were in their places at one or other of the half-dozen tables
that fill the room--two gentlemen from the Prefecture, a civil engineer
of the projected railway to Corte, a commercial traveller of the old
school, and, at the corner table, farthest from the door, Colonel Gilbert
of the Engineers. A clever man this, who had seen service in the Crimea,
and had invariably distinguished himself whenever the opportunity
occurred; but he was one of those who await, and do not seek
opportunities. Perhaps he had enemies, or, what is worse, no friends; for
at the age of forty he found himself appointed to Bastia, one of the
waste places of the War Office, where an inferior man would have done
better.

Colonel Gilbert was a handsome man, with a fair moustache, a high
forehead, surmounted by thin, receding, smooth hair, and good-natured,
idle eyes. He lunched and dined chez Clément always, and was frankly,
good naturedly bored at Bastia. He hated Corsica, had no sympathy with
the Corsican, and was a Northern Frenchman to the tips of his long white
fingers.

“Your Bastia, my good Clément,” he said to the host, who invariably came
to the dining-room with the roast and solicited the opinion of each guest
upon the dinner in a few tactful, easy words--“your Bastia is a sad
place.”

This evening Colonel Gilbert was in a less talkative mood than usual, and
exchanged only a nod with his artillery colleagues as he passed to his
own small table. He opened his newspaper, and became interested in it at
once. It was several days old, and had come by way of Nice and Ajaccio
from Paris. All France was at this time eager for news, and every
Frenchman studied the journal of his choice with that uneasiness which
seems to foreshadow in men's hearts the approach of any great event. For
this was the spring of 1870, when France, under the hitherto iron rule of
her adventurer emperor, suddenly began to plunge and rear, while the
nations stood around her wondering who should receive the first kick. The
emperor was ill; the cheaper journals were already talking of his
funeral. He was uneasy and restless, turning those dull eyes hither
and thither over Europe--a man of inscrutable face and deep hidden
plans--perhaps the greatest adventurer who ever sat a throne. Condemned
by a French Court of Peers in 1840 to imprisonment for life, he went to
Ham with the quiet question, “But how long does perpetuity last in
France?” And eight years later he was absolute master of the country.

Corsica in particular was watching events, for Corsica was cowed. She had
come under the rule of this despot, and for the first time in her history
had found her master. Instead of being numbered by hundreds, as they were
before and are again now at the end of the century, the outlaws hiding in
the mountains scarce exceeded a score. The elections were conducted more
honestly than had ever been before, and the Continental newspapers spoke
hopefully of the dawn of civilization showing itself among a people who
have ever been lawless, have ever loved war better than peace.

“But it is a false dawn,” said the Abbé Susini of Olmeta, himself an
insatiable reader of newspapers, a keen and ardent politician. Like the
majority of Corsicans, he was a staunch Bonapartist, and held that the
founder of that marvellous dynasty was the greatest man to walk this
earth since the days of direct Divine inspiration.

It was only because Napoleon III was a Bonaparte that Corsica endured his
tyranny; perhaps, indeed, tyranny and an iron rule suited better than
equity or tolerance a people descended from the most ancient of the
fighting races, speaking a tongue wherein occur expressions of hate and
strife that are Tuscan, Sicilian, Greek, Spanish, and Arabic.

Now that the emperor's hand was losing its grip on the helm, there were
many in Corsica keenly alive to the fact that any disturbance in France
would probably lead to anarchy in the turbulent island. There were even
some who saw a hidden motive in the appointment of Colonel Gilbert as
engineer officer to a fortified place that had no need of his services.

Gilbert himself probably knew that his appointment had been made in
pursuance of the emperor's policy of road and rail. For Corsica was to be
opened up by a railway, and would have none of it. And though to-day the
railway from Bastia to Ajaccio is at last open, the station at Corte
remains a fortified place with a loopholed wall around it.

But Colonel Gilbert kept his own counsel. He sat, indeed, on the board of
the struggling railway--a gift of the French Government to a department
which has never paid its way, has always been an open wound. But he never
spoke there, and listened to the fierce speeches of the local members
with his idle, easy smile. He seemed to stand aloof from his new
neighbours and their insular interests. He was, it appeared, a cultured
man, and perhaps found none in this wild island who could understand his
thoughts. His attitude towards his surroundings was, in a word, the usual
indifferent attitude of the Frenchman in exile, reading only French
newspapers, fixing his attention only on France, and awaiting with such
patience as he could command the moment to return thither.

“Any news?” asked one of the artillery officers--a sub-lieutenant
recently attached to his battery, a penniless possessor of an historic
name, who perhaps had dreams of carving his way through to the front
again.

The colonel shrugged his shoulders.

“You may have the papers afterwards,” he said; for it was not wise to
discuss any news in a public place at that time. “See you at the Réunion,
no doubt.”

And he did not speak again except to Clément, who came round to take the
opinion of each guest upon the fare provided.

“Passable,” said the colonel--“passable, my good Clément. But do you
know, I could send you to prison for providing this excellent leveret at
this time of year. Are there no game laws, my friend?”

But Clement only laughed and spread out his hands, for Corsica chooses to
ignore the game laws. And the colonel, having finished his coffee,
buckled on his sword, and went out into the twilight streets of what was
once the capital of Corsica. Bastia, indeed, has, like the majority of
men and women, its history written on its face. On the high land above
the old port stands the citadel, just as the Genoese merchant-adventurers
planned it five hundred years ago. Beneath the citadel, and clustered
round the port, is the little old Genoese town, no bigger than a village,
which served for two hundred and fifty years as capital to an island in
constant war, against which it had always to defend itself.

It would seem that some hundred years ago, just before the island became
nominally a French possession, Bastia, for some reason or another, took
it into its municipal head to grow, and it ran as it were all down the
hill to that which is now the new harbour. It built two broad streets of
tall Genoese houses, of which one somehow missed fire, and became a slum,
while the other, with its great houses but half inhabited, is to-day the
Boulevard du Palais, where fashionable Bastia promenades itself--when
it is too windy, as it almost always is, to walk on the Place St.
Nicholas--where all the shops are, and where the modern European
necessities of daily life are not to be bought for love or money.

There are, however, two excellent knife-shops in the Boulevard du Palais,
where every description of stiletto may be purchased, where, indeed, the
enterprising may buy a knife which will not only go shrewdly into a foe,
but come right out on the other side--in front, that is to say, for no
true Corsican is so foolish as to stab anywhere but in the back--and,
protruding thus, will display some pleasing legend, such as “Vendetta,”
 or “I serve my master,” or “Viva Corsica,” roughly engraved on the long
blade. There is a macaroni warehouse. There are two of those mysterious
Mediterranean provision warehouses, with some ancient dried sausages
hanging in the window, and either doorpost flanked by a tub of sardines,
highly, and yet, it would seem, insufficiently, cured. There is a tiny
book-shop displaying a choice of religious pamphlets and a fly-blown
copy of a treatise on viniculture. And finally, an ironmonger will sell
you anything but a bath, while he thrives on a lively trade in
percussion-caps and gunpowder.

Colonel Gilbert did not pause to look at these bewildering shop-windows,
for the simple reason that he knew every article there displayed.

He was, it will be remembered, a leisurely Frenchman, than whom there are
few human beings of a more easily aroused attention. Any small street
incident sufficed to make him pause. He had the air of one waiting for a
train, who knows that it will not come for hours yet. He strolled down
the boulevard, smoking a cigarette, and presently turned to the right,
emerging with head raised to meet the sea-breeze upon that deserted
promenade, the Place St. Nicholas.

Here he paused, and stood with his head slightly inclined to one side--an
attitude usually considered to be indicative of the artistic temperament,
and admired the prospect. The “Place” was deserted, and in the middle the
great statue of Napoleon stood staring blankly across the sea towards
Elba. There is, whether the artist intended it or not, a look of stony
amazement on this marble face as it gazes at the island of Elba lying
pink and hazy a few miles across that rippled sea; for on this side of
Corsica there is more peace than in the open waters of the Gulf of Lyons.

“Surely,” that look seems to say, “the world could never expect that puny
island to hold me.”

Colonel Gilbert stood and looked dreamily across the sea. It was plain to
the most incompetent observer that the statue represented one class of
men--those who make their opportunities; while Gilbert, with his high and
slightly receding forehead, his lazy eyes and good-natured mouth, was a
fair type of that other class which may take advantage of opportunities
that offer themselves. The majority of men have not even the pluck to do
that, which makes it easy for mediocre people to get on in this world.

Colonel Gilbert turned on his heel and walked slowly back to the Reunion
des Officiers--the military club which stands on the Place St. Nicholas
immediately behind the statue of Napoleon--a not too lively place of
entertainment, with a billiard-room, a reading-room, and half a dozen
iron tables and chairs on the pavement in front of the house. Here the
colonel seated himself, called for a liqueur, and sat watching a clear
moon rise from the sea beyond the Islet of Capraja.

It was the month of February, and the southern spring was already in the
air. The twilight is short in these latitudes, and it was now nearly
night. In Corsica, as in Spain, the coolest hour is between sunset and
nightfall. With complete darkness there comes a warm air from the ground.
This was now beginning to make itself felt; but Gilbert had not only the
pavement, but the whole Place St. Nicholas to himself. There are two
reasons why Corsicans do not walk abroad at night--the risk of a chill
and the risk of meeting one's enemy.

Colonel Gilbert gave no thought to these matters, but sat with crossed
legs and one spurred heel thrown out, contentedly waiting as if for that
train which he must assuredly catch, or for that opportunity, perhaps,
which was so long in coming that he no longer seemed to look for it. And
while he sat there a man came clanking from the town--a tired man, with
heavy feet and the iron heels of the labourer. He passed Colonel Gilbert,
and then, seeming to have recognized him by the light of the moon,
paused, and came back.

“Monsieur le colonel,” he said, without raising his hand to his hat, as a
Frenchman would have done.

“Yes,” replied the colonel's pleasant voice, with no ring of recognition
in it.

“It is Mattei--the driver of the St. Florent diligence,” explained the
man, who, indeed, carried his badge of office, a long whip.

“Of course; but I recognized you almost at once,” said the colonel, with
that friendliness which is so noticeable in the Republic to-day.

“You have seen me on the road often enough,” said the man, “and I have
seen you, Monsieur le Colonel, riding over to the Casa Perucca.”

“Of course.”

“You know Perucca's agent, Pietro Andrei?”

“Yes.”

“He was shot in the back on the Olmeta road this afternoon.”

Colonel Gilbert gave a slight start.

“Is that so?” he said at length, quietly, after a pause.

“Yes,” said the diligence-driver; and without further comment he walked
on, keeping well in the middle of the road, as it is wise to do when one
has enemies.




CHAPTER III.


A BY-PATH.

     “L'intrigue c'est tromper son homme;
     L'habileté c'est faire qu'il se trompe lui-même.”


For an idle-minded man, Colonel Gilbert was early astir the next morning,
and rode out of the town soon after sunrise, following the Vescovato
road, and chatting pleasantly enough with the workers already on foot and
in saddle on their way to the great plain of Biguglia, where men may
labour all day, though, if they spend so much as one night there, must
surely die. For the eastern coast of Corsica consists of a series of
level plains where malarial fever is as rife as in any African swamp, and
the traveller may ride through a fertile land where eucalyptus and palm
grow amid the vineyards, and yet no human being may live after sunset.
The labourer goes forth to his work in the morning accompanied by his
dog, carrying the ubiquitous double-barrelled gun at full cock, and
returns in the evening to his mountain village, where, at all events, he
may breathe God's air without fear.

The colonel turned to the right a few miles out, following the road which
leads straight to that mountain wall which divides all Corsica into the
“near” and the “far” side--into two peoples, speaking a different
dialect, following slightly different customs, and only finding
themselves united in the presence of a common foe. The road mounts
steadily, and this February morning had broken grey and cloudy, so that
the colonel found himself in the mists that hang over these mountains
during the spring months, long before he reached the narrow entrance to
the grim and soundless Lancone Defile. The heavy clouds had nestled down
the mountains, covering them like a huge thickness of wet cotton-wool.
The road, which is little more than a mule-path, is cut in the face of
the rock, and, far below, the river runs musically down to Lake Biguglia.
The colonel rode alone, though he could perceive another traveller on the
winding road in front of him--a peasant in dark clothes, with a huge felt
hat, astride on a little active Corsican horse--sure of foot, quick and
nervous, as fiery as the men of this strange land.

The defile is narrow, and the sun rarely warms the river that runs
through the depths where the foot of man can never have trodden since God
fashioned this earth. Colonel Gilbert, it would appear, was accustomed to
solitude. Perhaps he had known it so well during his sojourn in this
island of silence and loneliness, that he had fallen a victim to its
dangerous charms, and being indolent by nature, had discovered that it is
less trouble to be alone than to cultivate the society of man. The
Lancone Defile has to this day an evil name. It is not wise to pass
through it alone, for some have entered one end never to emerge at the
other. Colonel Gilbert pressed his heavy charger, and gained rapidly on
the horseman in front of him. When he was within two hundred yards of
him, at the highest part of the pass and through the narrow defile, he
sought in the inner pocket of his tunic--for in those days French
officers possessed no other clothes than their uniform--and produced a
letter. He examined it, crumpled it between his fingers, and rubbed it
across his dusty knee so that it looked old and travel-stained at once.
Then, with the letter in his hand, he put spurs to his horse and galloped
after the horseman in front of him. The man turned almost at once in his
saddle, as if care rode behind him there.

“Hi! mon ami,” cried the colonel, holding the letter high above his head.
“You have, I imagine, dropped this letter?” he added, as he approached
the other, who now awaited him.

“Where? No; but I have dropped no letter. Where was it? On the road?”

“Down there,” answered the colonel, pointing back with his whip, and
handing over the letter with a final air as if it were no affair of his.

“Perucca,” read the man, slowly, in the manner of one having small
dealings with pens and paper, “Mattei Perucca--at Olmeta.”

“Ah,” said the colonel, lighting a cigarette. He had apparently not
troubled to read the address on the envelope.

In such a thinly populated country as Corsica, faces are of higher import
than in crowded cities, where types are mingled and individuality soon
fades. The colonel had already recognized this man as of Olmeta--one of
those, perhaps, who had stood smoking on the “Place” there when Pietro
Andrei crawled towards the fountain and failed to reach it.

“I am going to Olmeta,” said the man, “and you also, perhaps.”

“No; I am exercising my horse, as you see. I shall turn to the left at
the cross-roads, and go towards Murato. I may come round by Olmeta
later--if I lose my way.”

The man smiled grimly. In Corsica men rarely laugh.

“You will not do that. You know this country too well for that. You are
the officer connected with the railway. I have seen you looking through
your instruments at the earth, in the mountains, in the rocks, and down
in the plains--everywhere.”

“It is my work,” answered the colonel, tapping with his whip the gold
lace on his sleeve. “One must do what one is ordered.”

The other shrugged his shoulders, not seeming to think that necessary.
They rode on in silence, which was only broken from time to time by the
colonel, who asked harmless questions as to the names of the mountain
summits now appearing through the riven clouds, or the course of the
rivers, or the ownership of the wild and rocky land. At the cross-roads
they parted.

“I am returning to Olmeta,” said the peasant, as they neared the
sign-post, “and will send that letter up to the Casa Perucca by one of my
children. I wonder”--he paused, and, taking the letter from his jacket
pocket, turned it curiously in his hand--“I wonder what is in it?”

The colonel shrugged his shoulders and turned his horse's head. It was,
it appeared, no business of his to inquire what the letter contained, or
to care whether it be delivered or not. Indeed, he appeared to have
forgotten all about it.

“Good day, my friend--good day,” he said absent-mindedly.

And an hour later he rode up to the Casa Perucca, having approached that
ancient house by a winding path from the valley below, instead of by the
high-road from the Col San Stefano to Olmeta, which runs past its very
gate. The Casa Perucca is rather singularly situated, and commands one of
the most wonderful views in this wild land of unrivalled prospects. The
high-road curves round the lower slope of the mountains as round the base
of a sugar-loaf, and is cut at times out of the sheer rock, while a
little lower it is begirt by huge trees. It forms as it were a cornice,
perched three thousand feet above the valley, over which it commands a
view of mountain and bay and inlet, but never a house, never a church,
and the farthest point is beyond Calvi, thirty miles away. There is but
one spur--a vast buttress of fertile land thrown against the mountain, as
a buttress may be thrown against a church tower.

The Casa Perucca is built upon this spur of land, and the Perucca
estate--that is to say, the land attached to the Casa (for property is
held in small tenures in Corsica)--is all that lies outside the road. In
the middle ages the position would have been unrivalled, for it could be
attacked from one side only, and doubtless the Genoese Bank of St. George
must have had bitter reckonings with some dead and forgotten rebel, who
had his stronghold where the Casa now stands. The present house is
Italian in appearance--a long, low, verandahed house, built in two parts,
as if it had at one time been two houses, and only connected later by a
round tower, now painted a darker colour than the adjacent buildings.
There are occasional country houses like it to be found in Tuscany,
notably on the heights behind Fiesole.

The wall defining the peninsula is ten feet high, and is built actually
on the roadside, so that the Casa Perucca, with its great wooden gate,
turns a very cold shoulder upon its poor neighbours. It is, as a matter
of fact, the best house north of Calvi, and the site of it one of the
oldest. Its only rival is the Chateau de Vasselot, which stands deserted
down in the valley a few miles to the south, nearer to the sea, and
farther out of the world, for no high-road passes near it.

Beneath the Casa Perucca, on the northern slope of the shoulder, the
ground falls away rapidly in a series of stony chutes, and to the south
and west there are evidences of the land having once been laid out in
terraces in the distant days when Corsicans were content to till the most
fertile soil in Europe--always excepting the Island of Majorca--but now
in the wane of the third empire, when every Corsican of any worth had
found employment in France, there were none to grow vines or cultivate
the olive. There is a short cut up from the valley from the mouldering
Chateau de Vasselot, which is practicable for a trained horse. And
Colonel Gilbert must have known this, for he had described a circle in
the wooded valley in order to gain it. He must also have been to the Casa
Perucca many times before, for he rang the bell suspended outside the
door built in the thickness of the southern wall, where a horseman would
not have expected to gain admittance. This door was, however, constructed
without steps on its inner side, for Corsica has this in common with
Spain, that no man walks where he can ride, so that steps are rarely
built where a gradual slope will prove more convenient.

There was something suggestive of a siege in the way in which the door
was cautiously opened, and a man-servant peeped forth.

“Ah!” he said, with relief, “it is the Colonel Gilbert. Yes; monsieur may
see him, but no one else. Ah! But he is furious, I can tell you. He is in
the verandah--like a wild beast. I will take monsieur's horse.”

Colonel Gilbert went through the palms and bamboos and orange-trees
alone, towards the house; and there, walking up and down, and stopping
every moment to glance towards the door, of which the bell still sounded,
he perceived a large, stout man, clad in light tweed, wearing an old
straw hat and carrying a thick stick.

“Ah!” cried Perucca, “so you have heard the news. And you have come, I
hope, to apologize for your miserable France. It is thus that you govern
Corsica, with a Civil Service made up of a parcel of old women and young
counter-jumpers! I have no patience with your prefectures and your young
men with flowing neck-ties and kid gloves. Are we a girls' school to be
governed thus? And you--such great soldiers! Yes, I will admit that the
French are great soldiers, but you do not know how to rule Corsica. A
tight hand, colonel. Holy name of thunder!” And he stamped his foot with
a decisiveness that made the verandah tremble.

The colonel laughed pleasantly.

“They want some men of your type,” he said.

“Ah!” cried Perucca, “I would rule them, for they are cowards; they are
afraid of me. Do you know, they had the impertinence to send one of their
threatening letters to poor Andrei before they shot him. They sent him a
sheet of paper with a cross drawn on it. Then I knew he was done for.
They do not send that _pour rire_.”

He stopped short, and gave a jerk of the head. There was somewhere in his
fierce old heart a cord that vibrated to the touch of these rude mountain
customs; for the man was a Corsican of long descent and pure blood. Of
such the fighting nations have made good soldiers in the past, and even
Rome could not make them slaves.

“Or you could do it,” went on Perucca, with a shrewd nod, looking at him
beneath shaggy brows. “The velvet glove--eh? That would surprise them,
for they have never felt the touch of one. You, with your laugh and idle
ways, and behind them the perception--the perception of the devil--or a
woman.”

The colonel had drawn forward a basket chair, and was leaning back in it
with crossed legs, and one foot swinging.

“I? Heaven forbid! No, my friend; I require too little. It is only the
discontented who get on in the world. But, mind you, I would not mind
trying on a small scale. I have often thought I should like to buy a
little property on this side of the island, and cultivate it as they do
up in Cap Corse. It would be an amusement for my exile, and one could
perhaps make the butter for one's bread--green Chartreuse instead of
yellow--eh?”

He paused, and seeing that the other made no reply, continued in the same
careless strain.

“If you or one of the other proprietors on this side of the mountains
would sell--perhaps.”

But Perucca shook his head resolutely.

“No; we should not do that. You, who have had to do with the railway,
must know that. We will let our land go to rack and ruin, we will starve
it and not cultivate it, we will let the terraces fall away after the
rains, we will live miserably on the finest soil in Europe--we may
starve, but we won't sell.”

Gilbert did not seem to be listening very intently. He was watching the
young bamboos now bursting into their feathery new green, as they waved
to and fro against the blue sky. His head was slightly inclined to one
side, his eyes were contemplative.

“It is a pity,” he said, after a pause, “that Andrei did not have a
better knowledge of the insular character. He need not have been in
Olmeta churchyard now.”

“It is a pity,” rapped out Perucca, with an emphatic stick on the wooden
floor, “that Andrei was so gentle with them. He drove the cattle off the
land. I should have driven them into my own sheds, and told the owners to
come and take them. He was too easy-going, too mild in his manners. Look
at me--they don't send me their threatening letters. You do not find any
crosses chalked on my door--eh?”

And indeed, as he stood there, with his square shoulders, his erect
bearing and fiery, dark eyes, Mattei Perucca seemed worthy of the name of
his untamed ancestors, and was not a man to be trifled with.

“Eh--what?” he asked of the servant who had approached timorously,
bearing a letter on a tray. “For me? Something about Andrei, from those
fools of gendarmes, no doubt.”

And he tore open the envelope which Colonel Gilbert had handed to the
peasant a couple of hours earlier in the Lancone Defile. He fixed his
eye-glasses upon his nose, clumsily, with one hand, and then unfolded the
letter. It was merely a sheet of blank paper, with a cross drawn upon it.

His face suddenly blazed red with anger. His eyes glared at the paper
through the glasses placed crookedly upon his nose.

“Holy name!” he cried. “Look at this--this to _me_! The dogs!”

The colonel looked at the paper with a shrug of the shoulders.

“You will have to sell,” he suggested lightly; and glancing up at
Perucca's face, saw something there that made him leap to his feet.
“Hulloa! Here,” he said quickly--“sit down.”

And as he forced Perucca into the chair, his hands were already at the
old man's collar. And in five minutes, in the presence of Colonel Gilbert
and two old servants, Mattei Perucca died.




CHAPTER IV.


A TOSS-UP.

     “One can be but what one is born.”


If any one had asked the Count Lory de Vasselot who and what he was, he
would probably have answered that he was a member of the English Jockey
Club. For he held that that distinction conferred greater honour upon him
than the accident of his birth, which enabled him to claim for
grandfather the first Count de Vasselot, one of Murat's aides-de-camp, a
brilliant, dashing cavalry officer, a boyhood's friend of the great
Napoleon. Lory de Vasselot was, moreover, a cavalry officer himself, but
had not taken part in any of the enterprises of an emperor who held that
to govern Frenchmen it is necessary to provide them with a war every four
years.

“Bon Dieu!” he told his friends, “I did not sleep for two nights after I
was elected to that great club.”

Lory de Vasselot, moreover, did his best to live up to his position. He
never, for instance, had his clothes made in Paris. His very gloves came
from a little shop in Newmarket, where only the seamiest and clumsiest of
hand-coverings are provided, and horn buttons are a _sine qua non_.

To desire to be mistaken for an Englishman is a sure sign that you belong
to the very best Parisian set, and Lory de Vasselot's position was an
enviable one, for so long as he kept his hat on and stood quite still and
did not speak, he might easily have been some one connected with the
British turf. It must, of course, be understood that the similitude of de
Vasselot's desire was only an outward one. We all think that every other
nation would fain be English, but as all other countries have a like
pitying contempt for us, there is perhaps no harm done. And it is to be
presumed that if some candid friend were to tell de Vasselot that the
moment he uncovered his hair, or opened his lips, or made a single
movement, he was hopelessly and unmistakably French from top to toe, he
would not have been sorely distressed.

It will be remembered that the Third Napoleon--the last of that strange
dynasty--raised himself to the Imperial throne--made himself, indeed, the
most powerful monarch in Europe--by statecraft, and not by power of
sword. With the magic of his name he touched the heart of the most
impetuous people in the world, and upon the uncertain, and, as it is
whispered, not always honest suffrage of the plebiscite, climbed to the
unstable height of despotism. For years he ruled France with a sort of
careless cynicism, and it was only when his health failed that his hand
began to relax its grip. In the scramble for place and power, the
grandson of the first Count de Vasselot might easily have gained a prize,
but Lory seemed to have no ambition in that direction. Perhaps he had no
taste for ministry or bureau, nor cared to cultivate the subtle knowledge
of court and cabinet, which meant so much at this time. His tastes were
rather those of the camp; and, failing war, he had turned his thoughts to
sport. He had hunted in England and fished in Norway. In the winter of
1869, he went to Africa for big game, and, returning in the early weeks
of March, found France and his dear Paris gayer, more insouciant, more
brilliant than ever.

For the empire had never seemed more secure than it did at this moment,
had never stood higher in the eyes of the world, had never boasted so
lavish a court. Paris was at her best, and Lory de Vasselot exclaimed
aloud, after the manner of his countrymen, at the sight of the young buds
and spring flowers around the Lac in the Bois de Boulogne, as he rode
there this fresh morning.

He had only arrived in Paris the night before, and, dining at the Cercle
Militaire, had accepted the loan of a horse.

“One will at all events see one's friends in the wood,” he said. But
riding there in an ultra-English suit of cords at the fashionable hour,
he found that he had somehow missed the fashion. The alleys, which had
been popular a year ago, were now deserted; for there is nothing so
fickle as social taste, and the riders were all at the other side of the
Route de Longchamps.

Lory turned his horse's head in that direction, and was riding leisurely,
when he heard an authoritative voice apparently directed towards himself.
He was in one of the narrow _allées_, “reserved for cavaliers,” and,
turning, perceived that the soft sandy gravel had prevented his hearing
the approach of other riders--a man and a woman. And the woman's horse
was beyond control. It was a little, fiery Arab, leaping high in the air
at each stride, and timing a nasty forward jerk of the head at the worst
moment for its rider's comfort.

There was no time to do anything but touch his own trained charger with
the spur and gallop ahead. He turned in his saddle. The Arab was gaining
on him, and gradually leaving behind the heavy horse and weighty rider
who were giving chase. The woman, with a set white face, was jerking at
the bridle with her left hand in an odd, mechanical, feeble way, while
with her right, she held to the pommel of her saddle. But she was swaying
forward in an unmistakable manner. She was only half conscious, and in a
moment must fall.

Lory glanced behind her, and saw a stout built man, with a fair moustache
and a sunburnt face, riding his great horse in the stirrups like a
jockey, his face alight with that sudden excitement which sometimes
blazes in light blue eyes. He made a quick gesture, which said as plainly
as words--“You must act, and quickly; I can do nothing.”

And the three thundered on. The rides in the Bois de Boulogne are all
bordered on either side by thick trees. If Lory de Vasselot pulled
across, he would send the maddened Arab into the forest, where the first
low branch must of a necessity batter in its rider's head. He rode on,
gradually edging across to what in France is the wrong side of the road.

“Hold on, madame; hold on,” he said, in a quick low voice.

But the woman did not seem to hear him. She had dropped the bridle now,
and the Arab had thrown it forward over its head.

Then Lory gradually reined in. The woman was reeling in the saddle as the
Arab thundered alongside. The wind blew back the long habit, and showed
her foot to be firmly in the stirrup.

“Stirrup, madame!” shouted Lory, as if she were miles away. “Mon Dieu,
your stirrup!”

But she only looked ahead with glazed eyes.

Then, edging nearer with a delicate spur, de Vasselot shook off his own
right stirrup, and, leaning down, lifted the fainting woman with his
right arm clean out of the saddle. He rested her weight upon his thigh,
and, feeling cautiously with his foot, found her stirrup and kicked it
free. He pulled up slowly, and, drawing aside, allowed the lady's
companion to pass him at a steady gallop after the Arab.

The lady was now in a dead faint, her dark red hair hanging like a rope
across de Vasselot's arm. She was, fortunately, not a big woman; for it
was no easy position to find one's self in, on the top, thus, of a large
horse with a senseless burden and no help in sight. He managed, however,
to dismount, and rather breathlessly carried the lady to the shade of the
trees, where he laid her with her head on a mound of rising turf, and,
lifting aside her hair, saw her face for the first time.

“Ah! That dear baroness!” he exclaimed; and, turning, he found himself
bowing rather stiffly to the gentleman, who had now returned, leading the
runaway horse. He was not, it may be mentioned, the baron.

While the two men were thus regarding each other in a polite silence, the
baroness opened a pair of remarkably bright brown eyes, at first with
wonder, and then with understanding, and finally with wonder again when
they lighted on de Vasselot.

“Lory!” she cried. “But where have you fallen from?”

“It must have been from heaven, baroness,” he replied, “for I assuredly
came at the right moment.”

He stood looking down at her--a lithe, neat, rather small-made man. Then
he turned to attend to his horse. The baroness was already busy with her
hair. She rose to her feet and smoothed her habit.

“Ah, good!” she laughed. “There is no harm done. But you saved my life,
my dear Lory. One cannot have two opinions as to that. If it were not
that the colonel is watching us, I should embrace you. But I have not
introduced you. This is Colonel Gilbert--my dear and good cousin, Lory de
Vasselot. The colonel is from Bastia, by the way, and the Count de
Vasselot pretends to be a Corsican. I mention it because it is only
friendly to tell you that you have something more than the weather and my
gratitude in common.”

She laughed as she spoke; then became suddenly grave, and sat down again
with her hand to her eyes.

“And I am going to faint,” she added, with ghastly lips that tried to
smile, “and nobody but you two men.”

“It is the reaction,” said Colonel Gilbert, in his soothing way. But he
exchanged a quick glance with de Vasselot. “It will pass, baroness.”

“It is well to remember at such a moment that one is a sportswoman,”
 suggested de Vasselot.

“And that one has de Vasselot blood in one's veins, you mean. You may as
well say it.” She rose as she spoke, and looked from one to the other
with a brave laugh. “Bring me that horse,” she said.

De Vasselot conveyed by one inimitable gesture that he admired her
spirit, but refused to obey her. Colonel Gilbert smiled contemplatively,
He was of a different school--of that school of Frenchmen which owes its
existence to Napoleon III.--impassive, almost taciturn--more British than
the typical Briton. De Vasselot, on the contrary, was quick and
vivacious. His fine-cut face and dark eyes expressed a hundred things
that his tongue had no time to put into words. He was hard and brown and
sunburnt, which at once made him manly despite his slight frame.

“Ah,” he cried, with a gay laugh, “that is better. But seriously, you
know, you should have a patent stirrup--”

He broke off, described the patent stirrup in three gestures, how it
opened and released the foot. He showed the rider falling, the horse
galloping away, the released lady-rider rising to her feet and satisfying
herself that no bones were broken--all in three more gestures.

“Voilà!” he said; “I shall send you one.”

“And you as poor--as poor,” said the baroness, whose husband was of the
new nobility, which is based, as all the world knows, on solid
manufacture. “My friend, you cannot afford it.”

“I cannot afford to lose _you_” he said, with a sudden gravity, and with
eyes which, to the uninitiated, would undoubtedly have conveyed the
impression that she was the whole world to him. “Besides,” he added, as
an after-thought, “it is only sixteen francs.”

The baroness threw up her gay brown eyes.

“Just Heaven,” she exclaimed, “what it is to be able to inspire such
affection--to be valued at sixteen francs!”

Then--for she was as quick and changeable as himself--she turned, and
touched his arm with her thickly-gloved hand.

“Seriously, my cousin, I cannot thank you, and you, Colonel Gilbert, for
your promptness and your skill. And as to my stupid husband, you know, he
has no words; when I tell him, he will only grunt behind his great
moustache, and he will never thank you, and will never forget. Never!
Remember that.” And with a wave of the riding-whip, which was attached to
her wrist, she described eternity.

De Vasselot turned with a deprecatory shrug of the shoulders, and busied
himself with the girths of his saddle. At the touch and the sight of the
buckles, his eyes became grave and earnest. And it is not only Frenchmen
who cherish this cult of the horse, making false gods of saddle and
bridle, and a sacred temple of the harness-room. Very seriously de
Vasselot shifted the side-saddle from the Arab to his own large and
gentle horse--a wise old charger with a Roman nose, who never wasted his
mettle in park tricks, but served honestly the Government that paid his
forage.

The Baroness de Mélide watched the transaction in respectful silence, for
she too took _le sport_ very seriously, and had attended a course of
lectures at a riding-school on the art of keeping and using harness. Her
colour was now returning--that brilliant, delicate colour which so often
accompanies dark red hair--and she gave a little sigh of resignation.

Colonel Gilbert looked at her, but said nothing. He seemed to admire her,
in the same contemplative way that he had admired the moon rising behind
the island of Capraja from the Place St. Nicholas in Bastia.

De Vasselot noted the sigh, and glanced sharply at her over the shoulder
of the big charger.

“Of what are you thinking?” he said.

“Of the millennium, mon ami”

“The millennium?”

“Yes,” she answered, gathering the bridle; “when women shall perhaps be
allowed to be natural. Our mothers played at being afraid--we play at
being courageous.”

As she spoke she placed a neat foot in Colonel Gilbert's hand, who lifted
her without effort to the saddle. De Vasselot mounted the Arab, and they
rode slowly homewards by way of the Avenue de Longchamps, through the
Porte Dauphine, and up that which is now the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne,
which was quiet enough at this time of day. The baroness was inclined to
be silent. She had been more shaken than she cared to confess to two
soldiers. Colonel Gilbert probably saw this, for he began to make
conversation with de Vasselot.

“You do not come to Corsica,” he said.

“I have never been there--shall never go there,” answered de Vasselot.
“Tell me--is it not a terrible place? The end of the world, I am told. My
mother”--he broke off with a gesture of the utmost despair. “She is
dead!” he interpolated--“always told me that it was the most terrible
place in the world. At my father's death, more than thirty years ago, she
quitted Corsica, and came to live in Paris, where I was born, and where,
if God is good, I shall die.”

“My cousin, you talk too much of death,” put in the baroness, seriously.

“As between soldiers, baroness,” replied de Vasselot, gaily. “It is our
trade. You know the island well, colonel?”

“No, I cannot say that. But I know the Chateau de Vasselot.”

“Now, that is interesting; and I who scarcely know the address! Near
Calvi, is it not? A waste of rocks, and behind each rock at least one
bandit--so my dear mother assured me.”

“It might be cultivated,” answered Colonel Gilbert, indifferently. “It
might be made to yield a small return. I have often thought so. I have
even thought of whiling away my exile by attempting some such scheme. I
once contemplated buying a piece of land on that coast to try. Perhaps
you would sell?”

“Sell!” laughed de Vasselot. “No; I am not such a scoundrel as that. I
would toss you for it, my dear colonel; I would toss you for it, if you
like.”

And as they turned out of the avenue into one of the palatial streets
that run towards the Avenue Victor Hugo, he made the gesture of throwing
a coin into the air.




CHAPTER V.


IN THE RUE DU CHERCHE-MIDI.

  “Il ne faut jamais se laisser trop voir, même à ceux qui nous aiment.”


It was not very definitely known what Mademoiselle Brun taught in the
School of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart in the Rue du Cherche-Midi in
Paris. For it is to be feared that Mademoiselle Brun knew nothing except
the world; and it is precisely that form of knowledge which is least
cultivated in a convent school.

“She has had a romance,” whispered her bright-eyed charges, and lapsed
into suppressed giggles at the mere mention of such a word in connection
with a little woman dressed in rusty black, with thin grey hair, a thin
grey face, and a yellow neck.

It would seem, however, that there is a point where even a
mother-superior must come down, as it were, into the market-place and
meet the world. That point is where the convent purse rattles thinly and
the mother-superior must face hunger. It had, in fact, been intimated to
the conductors of the School of the Sisterhood of the Sacred Heart by the
ladies of the quarter of St. Germain, that the convent teaching taught
too little of one world and too much of another. And the mother-superior,
being a sensible woman, agreed to engage a certain number of teachers
from the outer world. Mademoiselle Brun was vaguely entitled an
instructress, while Mademoiselle Denise Lange bore the proud title of
mathematical mistress.

Mademoiselle Brun, with her compressed mouth, her wrinkled face, and her
cold hazel eyes, accepted the situation, as we have to accept most
situations in this world, merely because there is no choice.

“What can you teach?” asked the soft-eyed mother-superior.

“Anything,” replied Mademoiselle Brun, with a direct gaze, which somehow
cowed the nun.

“She has had a romance,” whispered some wag of fourteen, when
Mademoiselle Brun first appeared in the schoolroom; and that became the
accepted legend regarding her.

“What are you saying of me?” she asked one day, when her rather sudden
appearance caused silence at a moment when silence was not compulsory.

“That you once had a romance, mademoiselle,” answered some daring girl.

“Ah!”

And perhaps the dusky wrinkles lapsed into gentler lines, for some one
had the audacity to touch mademoiselle's hand with a birdlike tap of one
finger.

“And you must tell it to us.”

For there were no nuns present, and mademoiselle was suspected of having
a fine contempt for the most stringent of the convent laws.

“No.”

“But why not, mademoiselle?”

“Because the real romances are never told,” replied Mademoiselle Brun.

But that was only her way, perhaps, of concealing the fact that there was
nothing to tell. She spoke in a low voice, for her class shared the long
schoolroom this afternoon with the mathematical class. The room did not
lend itself to description, for it had bare walls and two long windows
looking down disconsolately upon a courtyard, where a grey cat sunned
herself in the daytime and bewailed her lot at night. Who, indeed, would
be a convent cat?

At the far end of the long room Mademoiselle Denise Lange was
superintending, with an earnest face, the studies of five young ladies.
It was only necessary to look at the respective heads of the pupils to
conclude that these young persons were engaged in mathematical problems,
for there is nothing so discomposing to the hair as arithmetic.
Mademoiselle Lange herself seemed no more capable of steering a course
through a double equation than her pupils, for she was young and pretty,
with laughing lips and fair hair, now somewhat ruffled by her
calculations. When, however, she looked up, it might have been perceived
that her glance was clear and penetrating.

There was no more popular person in the Convent of the Sacred Heart than
Denise Lange, and in no walk of life is personal attractiveness so
much appreciated as in a girls' school. It is only later in life that
_ces demoiselles_ begin to find that their neighbour's beauty is
but skin-deep. The nuns--“fond fools,” Mademoiselle Brun called
them--concluded that because Denise was pretty she must be good. The
girls loved Denise with a wild and exceedingly ephemeral affection,
because she was little more than a girl herself, and was, like
themselves, liable to moments of deep arithmetical despondency.
Mademoiselle Brun admitted that she was fond of Denise because she was
her second cousin, and that was all.

When worldly mammas, essentially of the second empire, who perhaps had
doubts respecting a purely conventional education, made inquiries on this
subject, the mother-superior, feeling very wicked and worldly, usually
made mention of the mathematical mistress, Denise Lange, daughter of the
great and good general who was killed at Solferino. And no other word of
identification was needed. For some keen-witted artist had painted a
great salon picture of, not a young paladin, but a fat old soldier,
eighteen stone, on his huge charger, with shaking red cheeks and blazing
eyes, standing in his stirrups, bursting out of his tight tunic, and
roaring to his _enfants_ to follow him to their death.

It was after the battle of Solferino that Mademoiselle Brun had come into
Denise Lange's life, taking her from her convent school to live in a dull
little apartment in the Rue des Saints Pères, educating her, dressing
her, caring for her with a grim affection which never wasted itself in
words. How she pinched and saved, and taught herself that she might teach
others; how she triumphantly made both ends meet,--are secrets which,
like Mademoiselle Brun's romance, she would not tell. For French women
are not only cleverer and more capable than French men, but they are
cleverer and more capable than any other women in the world. History,
moreover, will prove this; for nearly all the great women that the world
has seen have been produced by France.

Denise and Mademoiselle Brun still lived in the dull little apartment
in the Rue des Saints Pères--that narrow street which runs southward
from the Quai Voltaire to the Boulevard St. Germain, where the cheap
frame-makers, the artists' colourmen, and the dealers in old prints have
their shops. To the convent school, the old woman and the young girl,
walking daily through the streets to their work, brought with them that
breath of worldliness which the advance of civilization seemed to render
desirable to the curriculum of a girls' school.

“It must be heavenly, mademoiselle, to walk in the streets quite alone,”
 said one of Mademoiselle Brun's pupils to her one day.

“It is,” was the reply; “especially near the gutter.”

But this afternoon there was no conversation, for the literature class
knew that Mademoiselle Brun was in a contrary humour.

“She is looking at that dear Denise with discontented eyes. She is in a
shocking temper,” had been the whispered warning from mouth to mouth.

And in truth Mademoiselle Brun constantly glanced down the length of the
schoolroom to where Denise was sitting. But a seeing eye could well
perceive that it was not with Denise, but with the schoolroom, that the
little old woman was discontented. Perhaps she had at times a cruel
thought that the Rue des Saints Pères, emphasized as it were by the Rue
du Cherche-Midi, was hardly gay for a young life. Perhaps the soft touch
of spring that was in the March air stirred up restless longings in the
soul of this little grey town-mouse.

And while she was watching Denise, the cross-grained old nun who acted as
concierge to this quiet house came into the room, and handed Denise a
long blue envelope.

“It is addressed in a man's handwriting,” she said warningly.

“Then let us by all means send for the tongs,” answered Denise, taking
the letter with a mock air of alarm.

But she looked at it curiously, and glanced towards Mademoiselle Brun
before she opened it. It was, perhaps, characteristic of the little old
schoolmistress to show no interest whatever. And yet to her it probably
seemed an age before Denise came towards her, carrying the letter in her
outstretched hand.

“At first,” said the girl, “I thought it was a joke--a trick of one of
the girls. But it is serious enough. It is a romance inside a blue
envelope--that is all.”

She gave a joyous laugh, and threw the letter down on Mademoiselle Brun's
knees.

“It is my father's cousin, Mattei Perucca, who has died suddenly, and has
left me an estate in Corsica,” she continued, impatiently opening the
letter, which Mademoiselle Brun fingered with pessimistic distrust. “See
here! that is the address of my estate in Corsica, where I shall invite
you to stay with me--I, who stand before you in my old black alpaca, and
would borrow a hairpin if you can spare it.”

Her hands were busy with her hair as she spoke; and she seemed to touch
life and its entanglements as lightly. Mademoiselle Brun, however, read
the letter very gravely. For she was a wise old Frenchwoman, who knew
that it is only bad news which may safely be accepted as true.

The letter, which was accompanied by an enclosure, was from a
Marseilles solicitor, and began by inquiring as to the identity of
Mademoiselle Denise Lange, instructress at the convent school in the Rue
du Cherche-Midi, with the daughter of the late General Lange, who met his
death on the field of Solferino. It then proceeded to explain that Denise
Lange had inherited the property known as the Perucca property, in the
commune of Calvi, in the Island of Corsica. Followed a schedule of the
said property, which included the historic château, known as the Casa
Perucca. The solicitor concluded with a word for himself, after the
manner of his kind, and clearly demonstrated that no other lawyer was so
capable as he to arrange the affairs of Mademoiselle Denise Lange.

“Jean Jacques Moreau,” read Mademoiselle Brun, with some scorn, the
signature of the Marseilles notary. “An imbecile, your Jean Jacques--an
imbecile, like his great and mischievous namesake. He does not say of
what malady your second cousin died, or what income the property will
yield--if any.”

“But we can ask him those particulars.”

“And pay for each answer,” retorted Mademoiselle Brun, folding the letter
reflectively.

She was remembering that a few minutes earlier she had been thinking that
their present existence was too narrow for Denise; and now, in the
twinkling of an eye, life seemed to be opening out and spreading with a
rapidity which only the thoughts of youth could follow and the energy of
spring keep pace with.

“Then we will go to Marseilles and ask the questions ourselves, and then
he cannot charge for each answer, for I know he could never keep count.”

But Mademoiselle Brun only looked grave, and would not rise to Denise's
lighter humour. It almost seemed, indeed, as if she were afraid--she who
had never known fear through all the years of pinch and struggle, who had
faced a world that had no use for her, that would not buy the poor
services she had to sell. For to know the worst is always a relief, and
to exchange it for something better is like exchanging an old coat for a
new one.

“And in the mean time--” said Mademoiselle Brun, turning sharply upon her
pupils, who had taken the opportunity of abandoning French literature.

“In the mean time,” said Denise, turning reluctantly away--“in the mean
time, I am filling a vat of so many cubic metres, from a well so many
metres deep, with a pail containing four litres, and of course the pail
has a leak in it, and the well becomes deeper as one draws from it, and
the Casa Perucca is, I suppose, a dream.”

She went back to her work, and in a few moments was quite absorbed in it.
And it was Mademoiselle Brun who could not settle to her French
literature, nor compose her thoughts at all. For change is the natural
desire of youth, and the belief that it must be for the better, part and
parcel of the astounding optimism of that state of life.

A few minutes later Denise remembered the enclosure--a letter in a thick
white envelope, which was still lying on her desk. She opened it.

“MADEMOISELLE” (the letter ran),

“I think I have the pleasure of addressing the daughter of an old
comrade-in-arms, and this must be my excuse for at once approaching my
object. I hear by accident that you have inherited from the late Mattei
Perucca his small property near Olmeta in Corsica. I knew Mattei Perucca,
and the property you inherit is not unknown to one who has had official
dealings with landowners in Corsica. I tell you frankly that it would be
impossible, in the present disturbed state of the island, for you to live
at Olmeta, and I ask you as frankly whether you are disposed to sell me
your small estate. I have long cherished the scheme of buying a small
parcel of land in Corsica for the purpose of showing the natives that
agriculture may be made profitable in so fertile an island, by dint of
industry and a firm and unswerving honesty. The Perucca property would
suit my purpose. You may be doing a good action in handing over your
tenants to one who understands the Corsican nature. I, in addition to
relieving the monotony of my present exile at Bastia, may perhaps be
inaugurating a happier state of affairs in this most unfortunate country.

“Awaiting your answer, I am, mademoiselle,

“Your obedient servant,

“LOUIS GILBERT (Colonel).”

The school bell rang as Denise finished reading the letter. The class was
over.

“We shall descend into the well again to-morrow,” she said, closing her
books.

The girls trooped out into the forlorn courtyard, leaving Mademoiselle
Brun and Denise alone in the schoolroom. Mademoiselle Brun read the
second letter with a silent concentration. She glanced up when she had
finished it.

“Of course you will sell,” she said.

Denise was looking out of the tall closed windows at the few yards of sky
that were visible above the roofs. Some fleecy clouds were speeding
across the clear ether.

“No,” she answered slowly; “I think I shall go to Corsica. Tell me,” she
added, after a pause--“I suppose I have Corsican blood in my veins?”

“I suppose so,” admitted Mademoiselle Brun, reluctantly.




CHAPTER VI.


NEIGHBOURS.

     “Chaque homme a trois caractères: celui qu'il a, celui qu'il
     montre, et celui qu'il croit avoir.”


By one of the strokes of good fortune which come but once to the most
ardent student of fashion, the Baroness de Mélide had taken up horsiness
at the very beginning of that estimable craze. It was, therefore, in mere
sequence to this pursuit that she fixed her abode on the south side of
the Champs Elysées, and within a stone's throw of the Avenue du Bois de
Boulogne, before the world found out that it was quite impossible to live
elsewhere. It is so difficult, in truth, to foretell the course of
fashion, that one cannot help wondering why the modern soothsayers, who
eke out what appears to be a miserable existence in the smaller streets
of the Faubourg St. Honoré and in the neighbourhood of Bond Street, do
not turn their second-sight to the contemplation of the future of streets
and districts, instead of telling the curious a number of vague facts
respecting their past and vaguer prophecies as to the future.

If, for instance, Cagliostro had foretold that to-day the Chausée
d'Antin would be deserted; that the faubourg would have completely ousted
the Rue St. Honoré; that the Avenue de la Grande Armée should be,
fashionably speaking, dead after a short and brilliant life; and that
the little streets of the Faubourg St. Germain should be all that is most
_chic_--what fortunes might have been made! Indeed, no one in a trance
or in his right mind can tell to-day why it is right to walk on the
right-hand side of the Boulevard des Italiens and the Boulevard des
Capucines, and heinously wrong to walk on the left; while, on the
contrary, no self-respecting Parisian would allow himself to be seen on
the right-hand pavement of the Boulevard de la Madeleine. Indeed, these
things are a mystery, and the wise seek only to obey, and not to ask the
reason why.

It would be difficult to lay before the English reader the precise social
position of the Baroness de Mélide. For there are wheels within wheels,
or, more properly perhaps, shades within shades, in the social world of
Paris, which are quite unsuspected on this side of the Channel. Indeed,
our ignorance of social France is only surpassed by the French ignorance
of social England. The Baroness de Mélide was rich, however, and the
rich, as we all know, have nothing to fear in this world. As a matter of
fact, Monsieur de Mélide dated his nobility from Napoleon's creation, and
madame's grandfather was of the Emigration. By conviction, they belonged
to the Anglophile school, and theirs was one of the prettiest little
houses between the Avenue Victor Hugo and the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne,
which is more important than ancestors.

It was to this miniature palace that Mademoiselle Brun and Denise were
bidden, to the new function of afternoon tea, the day after the receipt
of the lawyer's letter. Madame de Mélide would take no denial.

“I have already heard of Denise's good fortune; and from whom do you
think?” she wrote. “From my dear good cousin, Lory de Vasselot, who is,
if you will believe it, a Corsican neighbour--the Vasselot and Perucca
estates actually adjoin. Both, I need hardly tell you, bristle with
bandits, and are quite impossible. But I have quite decided that Lory
shall marry Denise. Come, therefore, without fail. I need not tell you to
see that Denise looks pretty. The good God has seen to that for you. And
as for Lory, he is an angel. I cannot think why I did not marry him
myself--except that he did not ask me. And then there is my stupid, whom
nobody else would have, and who now sends his dear love to his oldest
friend.--Your devoted JANE.”

The Baroness de Mélide was called Jeanne, but she had enthusiastically
changed that name for its English version at the period when England was,
as it were, first discovered by social France.

When Mademoiselle Brun and Denise arrived, they found the baroness
beautifully dressed as usual, and very French, for the empress was at
this time the leader of the world's women, as the emperor--that clever
_parvenu_--was undoubtedly the first monarch in Europe. It behoves not a
masculine pen to attempt a description of Madame de Mélide's costume,
which, moreover, was of a bygone mode, and nothing is so unsightly in
death as a deceased fashion.

“How good of you to come!” she cried, embracing both ladies in turn, with
a fervour which certainly seemed to imply that she had no other friends
on earth.

In truth, she had, for the moment, none so dear; for there are certain
warm hearts that are happy in always loving, not the highest, but the
nearest.

“Let me see, now,” she added, vigorously dragging forward chairs. “I
asked some one to meet you--some one I particularly wanted you to become
acquainted with, but I cannot remember who it is.” As she spoke she
consulted a little red morocco betting-book.

“Lory!” she cried, after a short search. “Yes, of course it was Lory de
Vasselot--my cousin. And--will you believe it?--he saved my life the
other day, all in a moment! Yes! I saw death, quite close, before my
eyes. Ugh! And I, who am so wicked! You do not know what it is to be
wicked and to know it, Denise--you who are so young. But that dear
Mademoiselle Brun, she knows.”

“Thank you,” said mademoiselle.

“And Lory saved me, ah! so cleverly. There is no better horseman in the
army, they say. Yes; he will certainly come this afternoon, unless there
is a race at Longchamps. Now, is there a race, I wonder?”

“For the moment,” said Mademoiselle Brun, very gravely, “I cannot tell
you.”

“She is laughing at me,” cried the baroness, shaking a vivacious
forefinger at Mademoiselle Brun. “But I do not mind; we cannot all be
wise--eh?”

“And what a dull world for the rest of us if you were,” said Mademoiselle
Brun; and Lory de Vasselot, coming into the room at this moment, was met
by her sour smile.

“Ah!” cried the baroness, “here he is. I present you, my dear Lory, to
Mademoiselle Brun, a terrible friend of mine, and to Mademoiselle Lange,
who, as you know, has just inherited the other half of Corsica.”

“My congratulations,” answered Lory, shaking hands with Denise in the
English fashion. “An inheritance is so nice when it is quite new.”

“And figure to yourself that this dear child has no notion how it has all
come about! She only knows the bare fact that some one is dead, and she
has gained--well, a white elephant, one may suppose.”

De Vasselot's quick face suddenly turned grave.

“Ah,” he said, “then I can tell you how it has all come about. Though I
confess at once that I have never been to Corsica, and have never found
myself a halfpenny the richer for owning land there.”

He paused for a moment, and glanced at Mademoiselle Brun.

“Unless,” he interpolated, “such personal matters will bore
mademoiselle.”

“But mademoiselle is the good angel of Mademoiselle Lange, my dear, dull
Lory,” explained the baroness; and the object of the elucidation looked
at him more keenly than so trifling an incident would seem to warrant.

“You will not be betraying secrets to the first-comer,” she said.

Still de Vasselot seemed to hesitate, as if choosing his words.

“And,” he said at length, “they shot your cousin's agent in the back,
almost in the streets of Olmeta, and Mattei Perucca himself died
suddenly, presumably from apoplexy, brought on by a great anger at
receiving a letter threatening his life--that is how it has come about,
mademoiselle.”

He broke off short, with a quick gesture and a flash of his eyes, usually
so pleasant and smiling.

“I have that from a reliable source,” he went on, after a pause, during
which Mademoiselle Brun looked steadily at Denise and said nothing.

“Gracious heavens!” exclaimed the baroness, in a whisper; and for once
was silenced.

“A faithful correspondent on the island,” explained de Vasselot. “Though
why he is faithful I cannot tell you. Some family legend, perhaps--I
cannot tell. It is the Abbé Susini of Olmeta who has told me this. He it
was who told me of your--well, I can only call it your misfortune,
mademoiselle. For there is assuredly a curse upon Corsica as there is
upon Ireland. It cannot govern itself, and no other can govern it. The
Napoleons have been the only men to make anything of the island, but a
man who is driving a pair of horses down the Champs Elysées cannot give
much thought to his little dog that runs behind. And it is in the
Bonaparte blood to drive, not only a pair, but a four-in-hand in the
thickest traffic of the world. The Abbé Susini tells me that when the
emperor's hand was firm, Corsica was almost orderly, justice was almost
administered, banditism was for the moment made to feel the hand of the
law, and the authorities could count the number of outlaws evading their
grip in the mountains. But since the emperor's illness has taken a
dangerous turn things have gone back again. Corsica is, it seems, a
weather-glass by which one may tell the state of the political weather in
France; and now it is disturbed, mademoiselle.”

He had become graver as he spoke, and now found himself addressing Denise
almost as if she were a man. There is as much difference in listeners as
there is in talkers. And Lory de Vasselot, who belonged to the new school
of Frenchmen--the open-air, the vigorous, the sportsmanlike--found his
interlocutor listening with clear eyes fixed frankly on his face.
Intelligence betrays itself in listening more than in talking, and de
Vasselot, with characteristic and an eminently national intuition,
perceived that this girl from a covent school in the Rue du Cherche-Midi
was not a person to whom to address drawing-room generalities, and those
insults to the feminine comprehension which a bygone generation called
compliments.

“But a woman need surely have nothing to fear,” said Denise, who had the
habit of carrying her head rather high, and now spoke as if this implied
more than a mere trick of deportment.

“A woman! You are not going to Corsica, mademoiselle?”

“But I am,” she answered.

De Vasselot turned thoughtfully, and brought forward a chair. He sat down
and gravely contemplated Mademoiselle Brun, whose attitude--upright in a
low chair, with crossed hands and a compressed mouth--betrayed nothing. A
Frenchman is not nearly so artificial as the shallow British observer has
been pleased to conclude. He is, in fact, much more a child of nature
than either an Englishman or a German. Lory de Vasselot's expression said
as plainly as words to Mademoiselle Brun--

“And what have _you_ been about?”

It was so obvious that Mademoiselle Brun, almost imperceptibly, shrugged
one shoulder. She was powerless, it appeared.

“But, if you will permit me to say so,” said Lory, sitting down and
drawing near to Denise in his earnestness, “that is impossible. I will
not trouble you with details, but it is an impossibility. I understand
that Mattei Perucca and his agent were the two strongest men in the
northern district, and they only attempted to hold their own, nothing
more. With the result that you know.”

“But there are many ways of attempting to hold one's own,” persisted
Denise; and she shook her head with a wisdom which only belongs to youth.

De Vasselot spread out his hands in utter despair. The end of the world,
it seemed, was at hand. And Denise only laughed.

“And when I have regulated my own affairs, I will undertake the
management of your estate at a high salary,” she said.

“There is only one thing to do,” said Lory, gravely, “and I have done it
myself. I have abandoned the idea of ever receiving a halfpenny of rent.
I have allowed the land to go out of cultivation. The vine-terraces are
falling, the olive trees are dying for want of cultivation. A few
peasants graze their cattle in my garden, I understand. The house itself
is only saved from falling down by the fact that it is strongly built of
stone. I would sell for a mere song, if I could find a serious offer of
that trifle; but nobody buys land in Corsica--for the peasants recognize
no title deeds and respect no rights of ownership. I had indeed an offer
the other day, but it was undoubtedly a joke, and I treated it as such.”

“Denise also has had an offer to buy the Perucca property,” said
Mademoiselle Brun.

“Yes,” said Denise, seeing his surprise. “And you would advise me to
accept it?”

“If it is a serious one, most decidedly.”

“It is serious enough,” answered Denise. “It is from a Colonel Gilbert,
an officer stationed at Bastia.”

“Ah!” he exclaimed; and at that moment another caller entered the room,
and he rose with eager politeness.

So it happened that Mademoiselle Brun could not see his face, and was
left wondering what the exclamation meant.

Several other callers now appeared--persons of the Baroness de Mélide's
own world, who had a hundred society tricks, and bowed or shook hands
according to the latest mode. This was not Mademoiselle Brun's world, and
she was not interested to hear the latest gossip from that hotbed of
scandal, the Tuileries, nor did the ever-changing face of the political
world command her attention. She therefore rose, and stiffly took her
leave. De Vasselot accompanied them to the hall.

Denise paused in the entrance, and turned to him.

“Seriously,” she said, “do you advise me to accept this offer to sell
Perucca?”

“I scarcely feel authorized to give you any advice upon the subject,”
 answered Lory, reluctantly. “Though, after all, we are neighbours.”

“Then--”

“Then, I should say not, mademoiselle. At all events, do nothing in
haste. And, if I may ask it, will you communicate with me before you
finally decide?”

They had come in an open cab, which was waiting on the shady side of the
street.

“A young man who changes his mind very quickly,” commented Mademoiselle
Brun, as they drove away.




CHAPTER VII.


JOURNEY'S END.

     “The offender never pardons.”


De Vasselot returned to the Baroness de Mélide's pretty drawing-room, and
there, after the manner of his countrymen, made himself agreeable in that
vivacious manner which earns the contempt of all honest and, if one may
say so, thick-headed Englishmen. He laughed with one, and with another
almost wept. Indeed, to see him sympathize with an elderly countess whose
dog was grievously ill, one could only conclude that he too had placed
all his affections upon a canine life.

He outstayed the others, and then, holding out his hand to the baroness,
said curtly--

“Good-bye.”

“Good-bye! What do you mean?”

“I am going to Corsica,” he explained airily.

“But where did you get that idea, mon ami?”

“It came. A few moments ago, I made up my mind.” And, with a gesture, he
described the arrival of the idea, apparently from heaven, upon his head,
and then a sideward jerk of the arm seemed to indicate the sudden and
irrevocable making up of his own mind.

“But what for?” cried the lady. “You were not even born there. Your
father died thirty years ago--you will not even find his tomb. Your dear
mother left the place in horror, just before you were born. Besides, you
promised her that you would never return to Corsica--and she who has been
dead only five years! Is it filial, I ask you, my cousin? Is it filial?”

“Such a promise, of course, only held good during her lifetime,” answered
Lory. “Since there is no one left behind to be anxious on my account, it
is assuredly no one's affair whether I go or stay.”

“And now you are asking me to say it will break my heart if you go,” said
the baroness, with a gay glance of her brown eyes; “and you may ask--and
ask!”

She shook hands as she spoke.

“Go, ingratitude!” she said. “But tell me, what will bring you back?”

“War,” he answered, with a laugh, pausing for a moment on the threshold.

And three days later Lory de Vasselot stood on the deck of a small
trading steamer that rolled sideways into Calvi Bay, on the shoulder, as
it were, of one of those March mistrals which serve as the last kick of
the dying winter. De Vasselot had taken the first steamer he could find
at Marseilles, with a fine disregard for personal comfort, which was part
of his military training and parcel of his sporting instincts. He was,
like many islanders, a good sailor, for, strange as it may seem, a man
may inherit from his forefathers not only a taste for the sea, but a
stout heart to face its grievous sickness.

There are few finer sights than Calvi Bay when the heavens are clear and
the great mountains of the interior tower above the bare coast-hills. But
now the clouds hung low over the island, and the shape of the heights was
only suggested by a deeper shadow in the grey mist. The little town
nestling on a promontory looked gloomy and deserted with its small square
houses and medieval fortress--Calvi the faithful, that fought so bravely
for the Genoese masters whose mark lies in every angle of its square
stronghold; Calvi, where, if (as seems likely) the local historian is to
be believed, the greatest of all sailors was born, within a day's ride of
that other sordid little town where the greatest of all soldiers first
saw the light. Assuredly Corsica has done its duty--has played its part
in the world's history--with Christopher Columbus and Napoleon as leading
actors.

De Vasselot landed in a small boat, carrying his own simple luggage. He
had not been very sociable on the trading steamer; had dined with the
captain, and now bade him farewell without an exchange of names. There is
a small inn on the wharf facing the anchorage and the wave-washed steps
where the fishing-boats lie. Here the traveller had a better lunch than
the exterior of the house would appear to promise, and found it easy
enough to keep his own counsel; for he was now in Corsica, where silence
is not only golden, but speech is apt to be fatal.

“I am going to St. Florent,” he said to the woman who had waited on him.
“Can I have a carriage or a horse? I am indifferent which.”

“You can have a horse,” was the reply, “and leave it at Rutali's at St.
Florent when you have done with it. The price is ten francs. There are
parts of the road impassable for a carriage in this wind.”

De Vasselot replied by handing her ten francs, and asked no further
questions. If you wish to answer no questions, ask none.

The horse presently appeared, a little thin beast, all wires, carrying
its head too high, boring impatiently--masterful, intractable.

“He wants riding,” said the man who led him to the door, half sailor,
half stableman, who made fast de Vasselot's portmanteau to the front of
the high Spanish saddle with a piece of tarry rope and simple nautical
knots.

He nodded curtly, with an upward jerk of the head, as Lory climbed into
the saddle and rode away; for there is nothing so difficult to conceal as
horsemanship.

“A soldier,” muttered the stable-man. “A gendarme, as likely as not.”

De Vasselot did not ask the way, but trusted to Fortune, who as usual
favoured him who left her a free hand. There is but one street in Calvi,
but one way out of the town, and a cross-road leading north and south.
Lory turned to the north. He had a map in his pocket, which he knew
almost by heart; for he was an officer of the finest cavalry in the
world, and knew his business as well as any. And it is the business of
the individual trooper to find his way in an unknown country. That a
couple of hours' hard riding brought him to his own lands, de Vasselot
knew not nor heeded, for he was aware that he could establish his rights
only by force of martial law, and with a miniature army at his back; for
civil law here is paralyzed by a cloud of false witnesses, while equity
is administered by a jury which is under the influence of the two
strongest of human motives, greed and fear.

At times the solitary rider mounted into the clouds that hung low upon
the hills, shutting in the valleys beneath their grey canopy, and again
descended to deep gorges; where brown water churned in narrow places. And
at all times he was alone. For the Government has built roads through
these rocky places, but it has not yet succeeded in making traffic upon
them.

With the quickness of his race de Vasselot noted everything--the trend of
the watersheds, the colour of the water, the prevailing wind as indicated
by the growth of the trees--a hundred petty details of Nature which would
escape any but a trained comprehension, or that wonderful eye with which
some men are born, who cannot but be gipsies all their lives, whether
fate has made them rich or poor; who cannot live in towns, but must
breathe the air of open heaven, and deal by sea or land with the wondrous
works of God.

It was growing dusk when de Vasselot crossed the bridge that spans the
Aliso--his own river, that ran through and all around his own land--and
urged his tired horse along the level causeway built across the old
river-bed into the town of St. Florent. The field-workers were returning
from vineyard and olive grove, but appeared to take little heed of him as
he trotted past them on the dusty road. These were no heavy, agricultural
boors, of the earth earthy, but lithe, dark-eyed men and women, who
tilled the ground grudgingly, because they had no choice between that and
starvation. Their lack of curiosity arose, not from stupidity, but from a
sort of pride which is only seen in Spain and certain South American
States. The proudest man is he who is sufficient for himself.

A single inquiry enabled de Vasselot to find the house of Rutali; for St.
Florent is a small place, with Ichabod written large on its crumbling
houses. It was a house like another--that is to say, the ground floor was
a stable, while the family lived above in an atmosphere of its own and
the stable drainage.

The traveller gave Rutali a small coin, which was coldly accepted--for a
Corsican never refuses money like a Spaniard, but accepts it grudgingly,
mindful of the insult--and left St. Florent by the road that he had come,
on foot, humbly carrying his own portmanteau. Thus Lory de Vasselot, went
through his paternal acres with a map. His intention was to catch a
glimpse of the Chateau de Vasselot, and walk on to the village of Olmeta,
and there beg bed and board from his faithful correspondent, the Abbé
Susini.

He followed the causeway across the marsh to the mouth of the river, and
here turned to the left, leaving the _route nationale_ to Calvi on the
right. That which he now followed was the narrower _route
departementale_, which borders the course of the stream Guadelle, a
tributary to the Aliso. The valley is flat here--a mere level of river
deposit, damp in winter, but dry and sandy in the autumn. Here are
cornfields and vineyards all in one, with olives and almonds growing amid
the wheat--a promised land of milk and honey. There are no walls, but
great hedges of aloe and prickly pear serve as a sterner landmark. At the
side of the road are here and there a few crosses--the silent witnesses
that stand on either side of every Corsican road--marking the spot where
such and such a one met his death, or was found dead by his friends.

Above, perched on the slope that rises abruptly on the left-hand side of
the road, the village of Oletta looks out over the plain towards St.
Florent and the sea--a few brown houses of dusky stone, with roofs of
stone; a square-towered church, built just where the cultivation ceases
and the rocks and the macquis begin.

De Vasselot quitted the road where it begins sharply to ascend, and took
the narrow path that follows the course of the river, winding through the
olive groves around the great rock that forms a shoulder of Monte Torre,
and breaks off abruptly in a sheer cliff. He looked upward with a
soldier's eye at this spot, designed by nature as the site of a fort
which could command the whole valley and the roads to Corte and Calvi.
Far above, amid chestnut trees and some giant pines, De Vasselot could
see the roof and the chimneys of a house--it was the Casa Perucca.
Presently he was so immediately below it that he could see it no longer
as he followed the path, winding as the river wound through the narrow
flat valley.

Suddenly he came out of the defile into a vast open country, spread out
like a fan upon a gentle slope rising to the height of the Col St.
Stefano, where the Bastia road comes through the Lancone defile--the road
by which Colonel Gilbert had ridden to the Casa Perucca not so very long
before. At the base of the fan runs the Aliso, without haste, bordered on
either bank by oleanders growing like rushes. Halfway down the slope is a
lump of land which looks like, and probably is, a piece of the mountain
cast off by some subterranean disturbance, and gently rolled down into
the valley. It stands alone, and on its summit, three hundred feet above
the plain, are the square-built walls of what was once a castle.

Lory stood for a moment and looked at this prospect, now pink and hazy in
the reflected light of the western sky. He knew that he was looking at
the Chateau de Vasselot.

Within the crumbling walls, built on the sheer edge of the rock, stood,
amid a disorderly thicket of bamboo and feathery pepper and deep copper
beech, a square stone house with smokeless chimneys, and, so far as was
visible, every shutter shut. The owner of it and all these lands, the
bearer of the name that was written here upon the map, walked slowly out
into the open country. He turned once and looked back at the towering
cliff behind him, the rocky peninsula where the Casa Perucca stood amidst
its great trees, and hid the village of Olmeta, perched on the mountain
side behind it.

The short winter twilight was almost gone before de Vasselot reached the
base of the mound of half-shattered rock upon which the chateau had been
built. The wall that had once been the outer battlement of the old
stronghold was so fallen into disrepair that he anticipated no difficulty
in finding a gap through which to pass within the enclosure where the
house was hidden; but he walked right round and found no such breach.
Where the wall of rock proved vulnerable, the masonry, by some curious
chance, was invariably sound.

It had not been de Vasselot's intention to disturb the old gardener, who,
he understood, was left in charge of the crumbling house, but to return
the next day with the Abbé Susini. But he was tired, and having failed to
gain an entrance, was put out and angry, when at length he found himself
near the great door built in the solid wall on the north-west side of the
ruin. A rusty bell-chain was slowly swinging in the wind, which was
freshening again at sunset, as the mistral nearly always does when it is
dying. With some difficulty he succeeded in swinging the heavy bell
suspended inside the door, so that it gave two curt clangs as of a rusty
tongue against moss-grown metal.

After some time the door was opened by a grey-haired man in his
shirt-sleeves. He wore a huge black felt hat, and the baggy corduroy
trousers of a deep brown, which are almost universal in this country. He
held the door half open and peered out. Then he slowly opened it and
stood back.

“Good God!” he whispered. “Good God!”

De Vasselot stepped over the threshold with one quick glance at the
single-barrelled gun in the man's hand.

“I am--” he began.

“Yes,” interrupted the other, breathlessly. “Straight on; the door is
open.”

Half puzzled, Lory de Vasselot advanced towards the house alone; for the
peasant was long in closing the door and readjusting chain and bolts. The
shutters of the house were all closed, but the door, as he had said, was
open. The place was neatly enough kept, and the house stood on a lawn of
that brilliant green turf which is only seen in parts of England, in
Ireland, and in Corsica.

De Vasselot went into the house, which was all dark by reason of the
closed shutters. There was a large room, opposite to the front door,
dimly indicated by the daylight behind him. He went into it, and was
going straight to one of the windows to throw back the shutters, when a
sharp click brought him round on his heels as if he had been shot. In a
far corner of the room, in a dark doorway, stood a shadow. The click was
that of a trigger.

Quick as thought de Vasselot ran to the window, snatched at the opening,
opened it, threw back the shutter, and was round again with bright and
flashing eyes facing the doorway. A man stood there watching him--a man
of his own build, slight and quick, with close upright hair like his own,
but it was white; with a neat upturned moustache like his own, but it was
white; with a small quick face like his own, but it was bleached. The
eyes that flashed back were dark like his own.

“You are a de Vasselot,” said this man, quickly.

“Are you Lory de Vasselot?”

“Yes.”

“Then I am your father.”

“Yes,” said Lory, slowly; “there is no mistaking it.”




CHAPTER VIII.


AT VASSELOT.

     “The life unlived, the deed undone, the tear unshed ...
     not judging those, who judges right?”


It was the father who spoke first.

“Shut that shutter, my friend,” he said. “It has not been opened for
thirty years.”

He had an odd habit of jerking his head upwards and sideways with raised
eyebrows. It would appear that a trick of thus deploring some unavoidable
misfortune had crystallized itself, as it were, into a habit by long use.
And the old man rarely spoke now without this upward jerk.

Lory closed the shutter and followed his father into an adjoining room--a
small, round apartment lighted by a skylight and impregnated with
tobacco-smoke. The carpet was worn into holes in several places, and the
boards beneath were polished by the passage of smooth soles. Lory glanced
at his father's feet, which were encased in carpet slippers several sizes
too large for him, bought at a guess in the village shop.

Here again the two men stood and looked at each other. And again it was
the father who broke the silence.

“My son,” he said, half to himself; “and a soldier. Your mother was a bad
woman, mon ami. And I have lived thirty years in this room,” he concluded
simply.

“Name of God!” exclaimed Lory. “And what have you done all this time?”

“Carnations,” replied the old man, gravely. “There is still daylight.
Come; I will show you. Yes; carnations.”

As he spoke he turned and opened the door behind him. It led out to a
small terrace no larger than a verandah, and every inch of earth was
occupied by the pale green of carnation-spikes. Some were budding, some
in bloom. But there was not a flower among them at which a modern
gardener would not have laughed aloud. And there were tears in Lory de
Vasselot's eyes as he looked at them.

The father stood, jerking his head and looking at his son, waiting his
verdict.

“Yes,” was the son's reply at last; “yes--very pretty.”

“But to-night you cannot see them,” said the old man, earnestly.
“To-morrow morning--we shall get up early, eh?”

“Yes,” said Lory, slowly; and they went back into the little windowless
room.

“We will get up early,” said the count, “to see the pinks. This cursed
mistral beats them to pieces, but I have no other place to grow them. It
is the only spot that is not overlooked by Perucca.”

He spoke slowly and indifferently, as if his spirit had been bleached,
like his face, by long confinement. He had lost his grip of the world and
of human interests. As he looked at his son, his black eyes had a sort of
irresponsible vagueness in their glance.

“Tell me,” said Lory, gently, at length, as if he were speaking to a
child; “why have you done this?”

“Then you did not know that I was alive?” inquired his father in return,
with an uncanny, quiet laugh, as he sat down.

“No.”

“No; no one knows that--no one but the Abbé Susini and Jean there. You
saw Jean as you came in. He recognized you or he would not have let you
in; for he is quick with his gun. He shot a man seven years ago--one of
Perucca's men, of course, who was creeping up through the tamarisk trees.
I do not know what he came seeking, but he got more from Jean than he
looked for. Jean was a boy when your mother went to France, and he was
left in charge of the château. For they all thought that I had gone to
France with your mother, and perhaps the police searched France for me; I
do not know. There is a warrant out against me still, though the paper it
is written on must be yellow enough after thirty years.”

As he spoke he carefully drew up his trousers, which were of corduroy,
like Jean's; indeed, the Count de Vasselot was dressed like a
peasant--but no rustic dress could conceal the tale told by the small
energetic head, the clean-cut features. It was obvious that his thoughts
were more concerned in his immediate environments--in the care, for
instance, to preserve his trousers from bagging at the knee--than he was
in the past. He had the curious, slow touch and contemplative manner of
the prisoner.

“Yes; Jean was a boy when he first came here, and now he is a grey-haired
man, as you see. He picks the olives and earns a little by selling them.
Besides, I provided myself with money long ago, before--before I died. I
thought I might live long, and I have, for thirty years, like a tree.”

Which was nearly true, for his life must have been somewhere midway
between the human and the vegetable.

“But why, my God!” cried Lory, impatiently, “why have you done it?”

“Why?” echoed the count, in his calm and suppressed way. “Why? Because I
am a Corsican, and am not to be frightened into leaving the country by a
parcel of Peruccas. They are no better than the Luccans you see working
in the road, and the miserable Pisans who come in the winter to build the
terraces. They are no Corsicans, but come from Pisa.”

“But if they thought you were dead, what satisfaction could there be in
living on here?”

But the count only looked at his son in silence. He did not seem to
follow the hasty argument. He had the placid air of a child or a very old
man, who will not argue.

“Besides, Mattei Perucca is dead.”

“So they say. So Jean tells me. I have not seen the abbé lately. He does
not dare to come more often than once in three months--four times a year.
Mattei Perucca dead!” He shook his head with the odd, upward jerk and the
weary smile. “I should like to see his carcass,” he said.

Then, after a pause, he went back to his original train of thought.

“We are different,” he said. “We are Corsicans. It was only when the
Bonapartes changed their name to a French one that your great-grandfather
Gallicized ours. We are not to be frightened away by the Peruccas.”

“But since he is dead--” said Lory, with an effort to be patient.

He was beginning to realize now that it was all real and not a dream,
that this was the Château de Vasselot, and this was his father--this
little, vague, quiet man, who seemed to exist and speak as if he were
only half alive.

“He may be,” was the answer; “but that will make no difference, since for
one adherent that we have the Peruccas have twenty. There are a thousand
men between Cap Corse and Balagna who, if I went outside this door and
was recognized, would shoot me like a rat.”

“But why?”

“Because they are of Perucca's clan, my friend,” replied the count, with
a shrug of the shoulder.

“But still I ask why?” persisted Lory.

And the count spread out his thin white hands with a gesture of patient
indifference.

“Well, of course I shot Andrei Perucca--the brother--thirty years ago. We
all know that. That is ancient history.”

Lory looked at the little white-haired, placid man, and said no word. It
was perhaps the wisest thing to do. When you have nothing to say, say
nothing.

“But he has had his revenge--that Mattei Perucca,” said the count at
length, in a tone of careless reminiscence--“by living in that house all
these years, and, so they tell me, by making a small fortune out of the
vines. The house is not his, the land is not his. They are mine. Only he
and I knew it, and to prove it I should have to come to life. Besides,
what is land in this country, unless you till it with a spade in one hand
and a gun in the other?”

Lory de Vasselot leant forward in his chair.

“But now is the time to act,” he said. “I can act if you will not.
I can make use of the law.” “The law,” answered his father, calmly. “Do
you think that you could get a jury in Bastia to give you a verdict? Do
you think you could find a witness who would dare to appear in your
favour? No, my friend. There is no law in this country, except that;”
 and he pointed to a gun in the corner of the room, an old-fashioned
muzzle-loader, with which he had had the law of Andrei Perucca thirty
years before.

“But now that there is no Perucca left the clan will cease to exist,”
 said Lory.

“Not at all,” replied the father. “The inheritor of the estate, whoever
it is, will become the head of the clan, and things will be as they were
before. They tell me it is a woman named Denise Lange.”

Lory gave a start. He had forgotten Denise Lange, and all that world of
Paris fad and fashion.

“And the women are always the worst,” concluded his father.

They sat in silence for some moments. And then the count spoke again in
his odd, detached way, as if he were contemplating his environments from
afar.

“There was a man in Sartene who had an enemy. He was a shoemaker, and
could therefore work at his trade indoors. He never crossed his threshold
for sixteen years. One day they told him his enemy was dead, that the
funeral was for the same afternoon. It passed his door, and when it had
gone by, he stepped out, after sixteen, years, to watch it, and--Paff! He
twisted himself round as he writhed on the ground, and there was his
enemy, laughing, with the smoke still at the muzzle. The funeral was a
trick. No; I shall not believe that Mattei Perucca is dead until the Abbé
Susini tells me that he has seen the body. Not that it would make any
difference. I should not go outside the door. I am accustomed to this
life now.”

He sat with his hands idly crossed on his knee, and looked at nothing in
particular. Nothing could arouse him now from his apathy, except perhaps
the culture of carnations--certainly not the arrival of the son whom he
had never seen. He had that air of waiting without expectancy which is
assuredly the dungeon mark, and a moral mourning worn for dead Hope.

Lory contemplated him as a strange old man who interested him despite
himself. There was pity, but nothing filial in his feelings. For filial
love only grows out of propinquity and a firm respect which must keep
pace with the growing demands of a daily increasing comprehension.

“Why did you come?” asked the count, suddenly.

It seemed as if his mind lay hidden under the accumulated _débris_ of the
years, as the old château perhaps lay hidden beneath that smooth turf
which only grows over ruins.

“I do not know,” answered Lory, thoughtfully. Then he turned in his quick
way, and looked at his father with a smile. “Perhaps it was the good God
who put the idea into my head, for it came quite suddenly. We shall grow
accustomed to each other, and then we may find perhaps that it was a good
thing that I came.”

The count looked at him with rather a puzzled air, as if he did not quite
understand.

“Yes,” he said at length--“yes; perhaps so. I thought it likely that you
would come. Do you mean to stay?”

“I do not know. I have not thought yet. I have had no time to think. I
only know I am hungry. Perhaps Jean will get me something to eat.”

“I have not dined yet,” said the count, simply. “Yes; we will dine.”

He rose, and, going to the door, called Jean, who came, and a whispered
consultation ensued. From out of the _débris_ of his mind the count
seemed to have unearthed the fact that he was a gentleman, and as such
was called upon to exercise an unsparing hospitality. He rather impeded
than helped the taciturn man, who seemed to be gardener and servant all
in one, and who now prepared the table, setting thereon linen and glass
and silver of some value. There was excellent wine, and over the simple
meal the father and son, in a jerky, explosive way, made merry. For Lory
was at heart a Frenchman, and the French know, better than any, how near
together tears and laughter must ever be, and have less difficulty in
snatching a smile from sad environments than other men.

It was only as he finally cleared the table that Jean broke his habitual
silence.

“The moon is up,” he said to the count, and that was all.

The old man rose at once, and went to a window, which had hitherto been
shuttered and barred.

“I sometimes look out,” he said, “when there is a moon.”

With odd, slow movements he opened the shutter and window, and, turning,
invited Lory by a jerk of the head to come and look. The moon, which must
have been at the full, was behind the château, and therefore invisible.
Before them, in a framework of giant pines that have no match in Europe,
lay a panorama of rolling plain and gleaming river. Far away towards
Calvi and the south, range after range of rugged mountain melted into a
distance, where the snow-clad summits of Cinto and Grosso stood
majestically against the sky. The clouds had vanished. It was almost
twilight under the southern moon. To the right the sea lay shimmering.

“I did not know that there was anything like it in Europe,” said Lory,
after a long pause.

“There is nothing like it,” answered his father, gravely, “in the world.”

Father and son were still standing at the open window, when Jean came
hurriedly into the room.

“It is the abbé,” he said, and went out again. The count stepped down
from the raised window recess, and turned up the lamp, which he had
lowered. Lory paused to close the shutter, and as he did so the Abbé
Susini came into the room without looking towards the window, which was
near the door by which he entered, without, therefore, seeing Lory. He
hurried into the room, and stopped dead, facing the count. He threw out
one finger, and pointed at his interlocutor as he spoke, in his quick
dramatic way.

“I have just seen a man from Calvi. One landed there this morning whom he
recognized. It could only have been your son. If one recognizes him,
another may. Is the boy mad to return thus--”

He broke off, and made a step nearer, peering into the count's face.

“You know something. I see it in your face. You know where he is.”

“He is there,” said the count, pointing over the priest's shoulder.

“Then God bless him,” said the Abbé Susini, turning on his heel.




CHAPTER IX.


THE PROMISED LAND.

     “I do not ask that flowers should always spring beneath my
     feet.”


Colonel Gilbert was not one of those visionaries who think that the lot
of the individual man is to be bettered by a change from, say, an empire
to a republic. Indeed, the late transformation from a republic to an
empire had made no difference to him, for he was neither a friend nor a
foe of the emperor. He had nothing in common with those soldiers of the
Second Empire who had won their spurs in the Tuileries, and owed
promotion to a woman's favouritism. He was, in a word, too good a soldier
to be a good courtier; and politics represented for him, as they do for
most wise men, an after-breakfast interest, and an edifying study of the
careers of a certain number of persons who mean to make themselves a name
in the easiest arena that is open to ambition.

The colonel read the newspapers because there was little else to do in
Bastia, and the local gossip “on tap,” as it were, at the cafés and the
“Réunion des Officiers,” had but a limited interest for him. He was,
however, at heart a gossip, and rode or walked through the streets of
Bastia with that leisurely air which seems to invite the passer-by to
stop and exchange something more than a formal salutation.

The days, indeed, were long enough; for his service often got the colonel
out of bed at dawn, and his work was frequently done before civilians
were awake. It thus happened that Colonel Gilbert was riding along the
coast-road from Brando to Bastia one morning before the sun had risen
very high above the heights of Elba. The day was so clear that not only
were the rocky islands of Gorgona and Capraja and Monte Cristo visible,
but also the mysterious flat Pianosa, so rarely seen, so capricious and
singular in its comings and goings that it fades from sight before the
very eyes, and in clear weather seems to lie like a raft on the still
water.

The colonel was contemplating the scene with a leisurely, artistic eye,
when some instinct made him turn his head and look over his shoulder
towards the north.

“Ah!” he muttered, with a nod of satisfaction.

A steamer was slowly pounding down towards Bastia. It was the Marseilles
boat--the old _Persévérance._ And for Colonel Gilbert she was sure to
bring news from France, possibly some one with whom to while away an hour
or so in talk. He rode more leisurely now, and the steamer passed him. By
the time he reached the dried-fruit factory on the northern outskirt of
the town, the _Persévérance_ had rounded the pier-head, and was gently
edging alongside the quay. By the time he reached the harbour she was
moored, and her captain enjoying a morning cigar on the wharf.

Of course Colonel Gilbert knew the captain of the _Persévérance._ Was he
not friendly with the driver of the St. Florent diligence? All who
brought news from the outside world were the friends of this idle
soldier.

“Good morning, captain,” he cried. “What news of France?”

The captain was a jovial man, with unkempt hair and a smoke-grimed face.

“News, colonel,” he answered. “It is not quite ready yet. The emperor is
always brewing it in the Tuileries, but it is not ripe for the public
palate yet.”

“Ah!”

“And in the mean time,” said the captain, testing with his foot the
tautness of the hawser that moored the _Persévérance_ to the quay--“in
the mean time they are busy at Cherbourg and Toulon. As to the army, you
probably know that better than I, mon colonel.”

And he finished with his jovial laugh. Then he jerked his thumb in the
direction of the steamer.

“Your newspapers are, no doubt, in the mail-bags,” he said. “We had a
good passage, and are a full ship. Of passengers I have two--and ladies.
One, by the way, is the heiress of Mattei Perucca over at Olmeta, whom
you doubtless knew.”

The colonel turned, and looked towards the steamer with some interest.

“Is that so?” he said reflectively.

“Yes; a pinched old maid in a black dress. None will marry her for her
acres. It will be a _pré salé_ with a vengeance. I caught a glimpse of
her as we came out of harbour. I did not see the other, who is young--her
niece, I understand. There she is, coming on deck now--the heiress, I
mean. She will not look her best after a night at sea.”

And, with a jerk of the head, he indicated a black-clad form on the deck
of the _Persévérance._ It happened to be Mademoiselle Brun, who, as a
matter of fact, looked no different after a night at sea to what she had
looked in the drawing-room of the Baroness de Mélide. She was too old or
too tough to take her colour from her environments. She was standing with
her back towards the quay, talking to the steward, and did not,
therefore, see the colonel until the clank of his spurred heel on the
deck made her turn sharply.

“You, mademoiselle!” exclaimed the colonel, on seeing her face as he
stood, _képi_ in hand, staring at her in astonishment.

“Yes; I am the ogre chosen by Fate to watch over Denise Lange,” she
answered, holding out her withered hand.

“But this is indeed a pleasure,” said the colonel, with his ready smile.
“I came by a mere accident to offer my services, as any Frenchman would,
to ladies arriving at such a place as Bastia, as a friend, moreover, of
Mattei Perucca, and never expected to see a face I knew. It is years,
mademoiselle, since we met--since before the war--before Solferino.”

“Yes,” said Mademoiselle Brun; “since before Solferino.”

And she glanced suspiciously at him, as if she had something to hide. A
chance word often is the “open sesame” to that cupboard where we keep our
cherished skeleton. Colonel Gilbert saw the quick glance, and
misconstrued it.

“I wrote a letter some time ago,” he said, “to Mademoiselle Lange, making
her an offer for her property, little dreaming that I had so old a friend
as yourself at hand, as one may say, to introduce us to each other.”

“No,” said Mademoiselle Brun.

“And I was surprised to receive a refusal.”

“Yes,” said Mademoiselle Brun, looking across the harbour towards the old
town.

“There are not many buyers of land in Corsica,” he explained, half
indifferently, “and there are plenty of other plots which would serve my
purpose. However, I will not buy elsewhere until you and Mademoiselle
Lange have had an opportunity of seeing Perucca--that is certain. No; it
is only friendly to keep my offer open.”

He was standing with his face turned towards the deck-house and the
saloon stairway, and tapped his boot idly with his whip. There was
something expectant and almost anxious in his demeanour. Mademoiselle
Brun was looking at his face, and he was perhaps not aware that it
changed at this moment.

“Yes,” she said, without looking round; “that is my niece. You find her
pretty?”

“Present me,” answered the colonel, turning to hook his sword to his
belt.

Denise came hurriedly across the deck, her eyes bright with anticipation
and happiness. This was a better life than that of the Rue du
Cherche-Midi, and the stir and bustle of the sailors, already at work on
the cargo, were contagious. She noticed that Mademoiselle Brun was
speaking to an officer, but was more interested in the carriage, which,
in accordance with an order sent by the captain, was at this moment
rattling across the stones towards the steamer.

“This,” said Mademoiselle Brun, “is Colonel Gilbert, whose letter you
answered a few weeks ago.”

“Ah, yes,” said Denise, returning his bow, and looking at him with frank
eyes. “Thank you very much, monsieur, but we are going to live at Perucca
ourselves.”

“By all means,” laughed the colonel, “try it, mademoiselle; try it. It is
an impossibility, I tell you frankly. And Corsica is not a country in
which to attempt impossibilities. See here! I perceive you have your
carriage ready, and the sailors are now carrying your baggage ashore. You
are going to drive to Perucca. Good! Now, as you pass along the road, you
will perceive on either side quite a number of small crosses, simply
planted at the roadside--some of iron, some of wood, some with a name,
some with initials. They are to be found all over Corsica, at the side of
every road. Those are people, mademoiselle, who have attempted
impossibilities in this country and have failed--at the very spot where
the cross is planted. You understand? I speak as a soldier to a soldier's
daughter.”

He looked at her, and nodded slowly and gravely with compressed lips.

“Rest assured that we shall not attempt impossibilities,” replied Denise,
gaily. “We only ask to be left alone to feed our poultry and attend to
our garden. I am told that the house and servants are as my father's
cousin left them, and we are expected to-day.”

“And you, colonel, shall be our protector,” added Mademoiselle Brun, with
one of her straight looks.

The colonel laughed, shrugged his shoulders, and accompanied them to the
carriage which awaited them.

“If one only knew whether you approve or disapprove of these hair-brained
proceedings,” he took an opportunity of saying to Mademoiselle Brun, when
Denise was out of earshot.

“If I only knew myself,” she replied coldly.

They climbed into the high, old-fashioned carriage, and drove through the
new Boulevard du Palais, upward to the hills above the town. And if they
observed the small crosses on either side of the road, marking the spot
where some poor wight had come to what is here called an accidental
death, they took care to make no mention of it. For Denise persisted in
seeing everything in that rose light which illumines the world when we
are young. She had even a good word to say for the _Persévérance_, which
vessel had assuredly need of such, and said that the captain was a good
French sailor, despite his grimy face.

“This,” she cried, “is better than your stuffy schoolroom!”

And she stood up in the carriage to inhale the breeze that hummed through
the macquis from the cool mountain-tops. There is no air like that which
comes as through a filter made of a hundred scented trees--a subtle
mingling of their clean woody odours.

“Look!” she added, pointing down to the sea, which looked calm from this
great height. “Look at that queer flat island there. That is Pianosa. And
there is Elba. Elba! Cannot the magic of that word rouse you? But no, you
have no Corsican blood in you; and you sit there with your uncompromising
old face and your black bonnet a little bit on one side, if I may mention
it”--and she proceeded to put Mademoiselle Brun's bonnet straight--“you,
who are always in mourning for something--I don't know what,” she added
half reflectively, as she sat down again.

The road to St. Florent mounts in a semi-circle behind Bastia through
orange-groves and vineyards, and the tiny private burial-grounds so dear
to Corsican families of position. These, indeed, are a proud people, for
they are too good to await the last day in the company of their humbler
brethren, but must needs have a small garden and a hideous little
mausoleum of their own, with a fine view and easy access to the highroad.

With many turns the great road climbs round the face of the mountain, and
soon leaving Bastia behind, takes a southern trend, and suddenly commands
from a height a matchless view of the Lake of Biguglia and the little
hillside village where a Corsican parliament once sat, which was once,
indeed, the capital of this war-torn island. For every village can boast
of a battle, and the rocky earth has run with the blood of almost every
European nation, as well as that of Turk and Moor. Beyond the lake, and
stretching away into a blue haze where sea and land melt into one, lies
the great salt marsh where the first Greek colony was located, where the
ruins of Mariana remain to this day.

Soon the road mounts above the level of the semi-tropical vegetation, and
passes along the face of bare and stony heights, where the pines are
small and the macquis no higher than a man's head.

Denise, tired with so long a drive at a snail's pace, jumped from the
carriage.

“I will walk up this hill,” she cried to the driver, who had never turned
in his seat or spoken a word to them.

“Then keep close to the carriage,” he answered.

“Why?”

But he only indicated the macquis with his whip, and made no further
answer. Mademoiselle Brun said nothing, but presently, when the driver
paused to rest the horses, she descended from the carriage and walked
with Denise.

It was nearly midday when they at last reached the summit of the pass.
The heavy clouds, which had been long hanging over the mountains that
border the great plain of Biguglia, had rolled northward before a hot and
oppressive breeze, and the sun was now hidden. The carriage descended at
a rapid trot, and once the man got down and silently examined his brakes.
The road was a sort of cornice cut on the bare mountain side, and a
stumble or the slipping of a brake-block would inevitably send the
carriage rolling into the valley below.

Denise sat upright, and looked quickly, with eager movements of the head,
from side to side. Soon they reached the region of the upper pines, which
are small, and presently passed a piece of virgin forest--of those great
pines which have no like in Europe.

“Look!” said Denise, gazing up at the great trees with a sort of gasp of
excitement.

But mademoiselle had only eyes for the road in front. Before long they
passed into the region of chestnuts, and soon saw the first habitation
they had seen for two hours. For this is one of the most thinly peopled
lands of Europe, and four great nations of the Continent have at one time
or other done their best to exterminate this untameable race. Then a few
more houses and a smaller road branching off to the left from the
highway. The carriage swung round into this, which led straight to a wall
built right across it. The driver pulled up, and, turning, brought the
horses to a standstill at a door built in the solid wall. With his whip
he indicated a bell-chain, rusty and worn, that swung in the breeze.

There was nobody to be seen. The clouds had closed down over the
mountains. Even the tops of the great pines were hidden in a thin mist.

Denise got down and rang the bell. After a long pause the door was opened
by a woman in black, with a black silk handkerchief over her head, who
looked gravely at them.

“I am Denise Lange,” said the girl.

“And I,” said the woman, stepping back to admit them, “am the widow of
Pietro Andrei, who was shot at Olmeta.”

And Denise Lange entered her own door followed by Mademoiselle Brun.




CHAPTER X.


THUS FAR.

     “There are some occasions on which a man must sell half his
     secret in order to conceal the rest.”


“There is some one moving among the oleanders down by the river,” said
the count, coming quickly into the room where Lory de Vasselot was
sitting, one morning some days after his unexpected arrival at the
château.

The old man was cool enough, but he closed the window that led to the
small terrace where he cultivated his carnations, with that haste which
indicates a recognition of undeniable danger, coupled with no feeling of
fear.

“I know every branch in the valley,” he said, “every twig, every leaf,
every shadow. There is some one there.”

Lory rose, and laid aside the pen with which he was writing for an
extended leave of absence. In four days these two had, as one of them had
predicted, grown accustomed to each other. And the line between custom
and necessity is a fine drawn one.

“Show me,” he said, going towards the window.

“Ah!” murmured the count, jerking his head. “You will hardly perceive it
unless you are a hunter--or the hunted.”

Lory glanced at his father. Assuredly the sleeping mind was beginning to
rouse itself.

“It is nothing but the stirring of a leaf here, the movement of a branch
there, which are unusual and unnatural.”

As he spoke, he opened the window with that slow caution which had become
habitual to his every thought and action.

“There,” he said, pointing with a steady hand; “to the left of that
almond tree which is still in bloom. Watch those willows which have come
there since the wall fell away, and the terrace slipped into the flooded
river twenty-one years this spring. You will see the branches move.
There--there! You see. It is a man, and he comes too slowly to have an
honest purpose.”

“I see,” said Lory. “Is that land ours?”

The count gave an odd little laugh.

“You can see nothing from this window that is not ours,” he answered.
“As much as any other man's,” he added, after a pause. For the conviction
still holds good in some Corsican minds that the mountains are common
property.

“He is coming slowly, but not very cautiously,” said Lory. “Not like a
man who thinks that he may be watched from here. He probably is taking no
heed of these windows, for he thinks the place is deserted.”

“It is more probable,” replied the count, “that he is coming here to
ascertain that fact. What the abbé has heard, another may hear, though he
would not learn it from the abbé. If you want a secret kept, tell it to a
priest, and of all priests, the Abbé Susini. Some one has heard that you
are here in Corsica, and is creeping up to the castle to find out.”

“And I will go and find him out. Two can play at that game in the
bushes,” said Lory, with a laugh.

“If you go, take a gun; one can never tell how a game may turn.”

“Yes; I will take a gun if you wish it.” And Lory went towards the door.
“No,” he said, pausing in answer to a gesture made by his father, “not
that one. It is of too old a make.”

And he went out of the room, leaving his father holding in his hand the
gun with which he had shot Andrei Perucca thirty years before. He stood
looking at the closed door with dim, reflective eyes. Then he looked at
the gun, which he set slowly back in its corner.

“It seems,” he said to himself, “that I am of too old a make also.”

He went to the window, and, opening it cautiously, stood looking down
into the valley. There he perceived that, though two may play at the same
game, it is usually given to one to play it better than the other. For he
who was climbing up the hill might be followed by a careful eye, by the
chance displacement of a twig, the bending of a bough; while Lory,
creeping down into the valley, remained quite invisible, even to his
father, upon whose memory every shadow was imprinted.

“Aha!” laughed the old man, under his breath. “One sees that the boy is a
Corsican. And,” he added, after a pause, “one would almost say that the
other is not.”

In which the count's trained eye--trained as only is the vision of the
hunted--was by no means deceived. For Lory, who was far down in the
valley, had already caught sight of a braided sleeve, and, a moment
later, recognized Colonel Gilbert. The colonel not only failed to
perceive him, but was in nowise looking for him. He appeared to be
entirely absorbed, first in the examination of the ground beneath his
feet, and then in the contemplation of the rising land. In his hand he
seemed to be carrying a note-book, and, so far as the watcher could see,
consulted from time to time a compass.

“He is only engaged in his trade,” said Lory to himself, with a laugh;
and, going out into the open, he sat down on a rock with the gun across
his knee and waited.

Thus it happened that Colonel Gilbert, working his way up through the
bushes, note-book in hand, looked up and saw, within a few yards of him,
the owner of the land upon which they stood, whom he had every reason to
believe to be in Paris.

His ruddy face was of a deeper red as he slipped his note-book within his
tunic and came forward, holding out his hand. But his smile was as ready
and good-natured as ever.

“Well met!” he said. “You find me, count, taking a professional and
business-like survey of the laud that you promised to sell me.”

“You are welcome to take the survey,” answered Lory, taking the
outstretched, cordial hand, “but I must ask you to let me keep the land.
I did not take your offer seriously.”

“It was intended seriously, I assure you.”

“Then it was my mistake,” answered Lory, quite pleasantly.

He tapped himself vigorously on the chest, and made a gesture indicating
that at a word from the colonel he was ready to lay violent hands upon
himself for having been so foolish. The colonel laughed, and shrugged his
shoulders as if the matter were but a small one. The pitiless
Mediterranean, almost African, sun poured down on them, and one of those
short spells of absolute calm, which are characteristic of these
latitudes, made it unbearably hot. The colonel took off his cap, and,
sitting down in quite a friendly way near de Vasselot on a rock,
proceeded to mop his high forehead, pressing back the thin smooth hair
which was touched here and there with grey.

“You have come here at the wrong time,” he said. “The heats have begun.
One longs for the cool breezes of Paris or of Normandy.”

And he paused, giving Lory an opportunity of explaining why he had come
at this time, which opportunity was promptly neglected.

“At all events, count,” said the colonel, replacing his cap and lighting
a cigarette, “I did not deceive you as to the nature of the land which I
wished to buy. It is a desert, as you see. And yet I cannot help thinking
that something might be made of this land.”

He sat and gazed lazily in front of him. Presently, leaving his cigarette
to smoulder, he began to buzz through his teeth, in the bucolic manner,
an air of Offenbach. He was, in a word, entirely agricultural, and
consequently slow of speech.

“Yes, count,” he said, with conviction, after a long pause; “there is
only one drawback to Corsica.”

“Ah?”

“The Corsicans,” said the colonel, gravely. “You do not know them as I
do; for I suppose you have only been here a few days?”

De Vasselot's quick eyes glanced for a moment at the colonel's face, but
no reply was made to the supposition. Then the colonel fell to his
guileless Offenbach again. There is nothing so innocent as the meditative
rendering of a well-known tune. A popular air is that which echoes in
empty heads.

Colonel Gilbert glanced sideways at his companion. He had not thought
that this was a silent man. Nature was singularly at fault in her
mouldings if this slightly made, dark-eyed Frenchman was habitually
taciturn. And the colonel was vaguely uneasy.

“My horse,” he said, “is up at Olmeta. I took a walk round by the river.
It is my business to answer innumerable questions from the Ministry of
the Interior. Railway projects are still in the air, you understand. I
must know my Corsica. Besides, as I tell you, I thought I was on my own
land.”

“I am sorry that I cannot hold to my joke, for it was nothing else, as
you know.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” acquiesced the colonel. “And in the mean time, it
is a great pleasure to see you here, as well as a surprise. I need hardly
tell you that your presence here is quite unknown to your neighbours. We
have little to talk about at this end of the island now that the
Administration is centred more than ever at Ajaccio; and were it known in
the district that you are at Vasselot, you may be sure I should have
heard of it at the café or at the hotel where I dine.”

“Yes. I came without drum or trumpet.”

“You are wise.”

The remark was made so significantly that Lory could not ignore it even
if such a course had recommended itself to one of his quick and impulsive
nature.

“What do you mean, colonel?”

Gilbert made a little gesture of the hand that held the half-burnt
cigarette. He deprecated, it would appear, having been drawn to talk on
so serious a topic.

“Well, I speak as one Frenchman to another, as one soldier to another. If
the emperor does not die, he will declare war against Germany. There is
the situation in a nutshell, is it not? And do you think the army can
afford to lose one man at the present time, especially a man who has made
good use of such small opportunities of distinction as the fates have
offered him? And, so far as I have been able to follow the intricacies of
the parochial politics, your life is not worth two sous in this country,
my dear count. There, I have spoken. A word to the wise, is it not?”

He rose, and threw away his cigarette with a nod and a smile.

“And now I must be returning. You will allow me to pass up that small
pathway that leads past the chateau. Some day I should, above all things,
like to see the chateau. I am interested in old houses, I tell you
frankly.”

“I will walk part of the way with you,” answered Lory, with a stiffness
which was entirely due to a sense of self-reproach. For it was his
instinct to be hospitable and open-handed and friendly. And Lory would
have liked to ask the colonel then and there to come to the chateau.

“By the way,” said the colonel, as they climbed the hill together, “I did
not, of course, mean to suggest that you should sell me the old house
which bears your name--only a piece of land, a few hectares on this
south-west slope, that I may amuse myself with agriculture, as I told
you. Perhaps some day you may reconsider your decision?”

He waited for a reply to this suggestion, or an invitation in response to
the hint that he was interested in the old house. But neither came.

“I am much obliged to you for your warning as to the unpopularity of my
name in this district,” said Lory, rather laboriously changing the
subject. “I had, of course, heard something of the same sort before; but
I do not attach much importance to local tradition, do you?”

The colonel paused for a few minutes. He had the leisurely conversational
manner of an old man.

“These people have undergone a change,” he said at length, “since their
final subjugation by ourselves--exactly a hundred years ago, by the way.
They were a turbulent, fighting, obstinate people. Those qualities--good
enough in times of war--go bad in times of peace. They are a lawless,
idle, dishonest people now. Their grand fighting qualities have run to
seed in municipal disagreements and electioneering squabbles. And, worst
of all, we have grafted on them our French thrift, which has run to
greed. There is not a man in the district who would shoot you, count,
from any idea of the vendetta, but there are a hundred who would do it
for a thousand-franc note, or in order to prevent you taking back the
property which he has stolen from you. That is how it stands. And that is
why Pietro Andrei came to grief at Olmeta.”

“And Mattei Perucca?” asked Lory, thereby causing the colonel to trip
suddenly over a stone.

“Oh, Perucca,” he answered, “that was different. He died a more or less
natural death. He was a very stout man, and on receiving a letter, gave
way to such ungovernable rage that he fell in a fit. True, it was a
threatening letter; but such are common enough in this country. It may
have been a joke or may have had some comparatively harmless object. None
could have foreseen such a result.”

They were now near the chateau, and the colonel rather suddenly shook
hands and went away.

“I am always to be found at Bastia, and am always at your service,” he
said, waving a farewell with his whip.

Lory found the door of the chateau ajar, and Jean watching behind it. His
father, however, seemed to have forgotten upon what mission he had gone
forth, and was sitting placidly in the little room, lighted by a
skylight, where they always lived. The sight of Lory reminded him,
however.

“Who was it?” he asked, without showing a very keen interest.

“It was a man called Gilbert,” answered Lory, “whom I have met in Paris.
An engineer. He is stationed at Bastia, and is connected with the railway
scheme. A man I should like to like, and yet--He ought to be a good
fellow. He has every qualification, and yet--”

Lory did not finish the sentence, but stood reflectively looking at his
father.

“He has more than once offered to buy Vasselot,” he said, watching for
the effect.

“You must never sell Vasselot,” replied the old man. He did not seem to
conceive it possible that there should be any temptation to do so.

“I do not quite understand Colonel Gilbert,” continued Lory. “He has also
offered to buy Perucca; but there I think he has to deal with a clever
woman.”




CHAPTER XI.


BY SURPRISE.

     “C'est ce qu'on ne dit pas qui explique ce qu'on dit.”


From the Rue du Cherche-Midi in Paris to the Casa Perucca in Corsica is
as complete a change as even the heart of woman may desire. For the Rue
du Cherche-Midi is probably the noisiest corner of that noisy Paris that
lies south of the Seine; and the Casa Perucca is one of the few quiet
corners of Europe where the madding crowd is non-existent, and that
crowning effort of philanthropic folly, the statute holiday, has yet to
penetrate.

“Yes,” said Mademoiselle Brun, one morning, after she and Denise had
passed two months in what she was pleased to term exile--“yes; it is
peaceful. Give me war,” she added grimly, after a pause.

They were standing on the terrace that looked down over the great valley
of Vasselot. There was not a house in sight except the crumbling chateau.
The month was June, and the river, which could be heard in winter, was
now little more than a trickling stream. A faint breeze stirred the young
leaves of the copper-beech, which is a silent tree by nature, and did not
so much as whisper now. There are few birds in Corsica, for the natives
are great sportsmen, and will shoot, sitting, anything from a man to a
sparrow in season and out.

“Listen,” said Mademoiselle Brun, holding up one steady, yellow finger;
but the silence was such as will make itself felt. “And the neighbours do
not call much,” added mademoiselle, in completion of her own thoughts.

Denise laughed. She had been up early, for they were almost alone in the
Casa Perucca now. The servants who had obeyed Mattei Perucca in fear and
trembling, had refused to obey Denise, who, with much spirit, had
dismissed them one and all. An old man remained, who was generally
considered to be half-witted; and Maria Andrei, the widow of Pietro, who
was shot at Olmeta. Denise superintended the small farm.

“That cheery Maria,” said Mademoiselle Brun, “she is our only resource,
and reminds me of a cheap funeral.”

“There is the colonel,” said Denise. “You forget him.”

“Yes; there is the colonel, who is so kind to us.”

And Mademoiselle Brun slowly contemplated the whole landscape, taking in
Denise, as it were, in passing.

“And there is our little friend,” she added, “down in the valley there
who does not call.”

“Why do you call him little?” asked Denise, looking down at the Chateau
de Vasselot. “He is not little.”

“He is not so large as the colonel,” explained mademoiselle.

“I wonder why he does not call?” said Denise, presently, looking down
into the valley, as if she could perhaps see the explanation there.

“It has something to do with the social geography of the district,” said
mademoiselle, “which we do not understand. The Cheap Funeral alone knows
it. Half of the country she colours red, the other half black.
Theoretically, we hate a number of persons who reciprocate the feeling
heartily. Practically, we do not know of their existence. I imagine the
Count de Vasselot hates us on the same principle.”

“But we are not going to be dictated to by a number of ignorant
peasants,” cried Denise, angrily.

“I rather fancy we are.”

Denise was standing by the low wall, with her head thrown back. She was
naturally energetic, and had the carriage that usually goes with that
quality.

“Are you sure he is there?” she asked, still looking down at the château.

“No, I am not. I have only Maria's word for it.”

“Then I am going to the village of Olmeta to find out,” said Denise.

And mademoiselle followed her to the house without comment. Indeed, she
seemed willing enough to do that which they had been warned not to do.

On the road that skirts the hill and turns amid groves of chestnut trees,
they met two men, loitering along with no business in hand, who scowled
at them and made no salutation.

“They may scowl beneath their great hats,” said Denise; “I am not afraid
of them.” And she walked on with her chin well up.

Below them, on the left, the terraces of vine and olive were weed-grown
and neglected; for Denise had found no one to work on her land, and the
soil here is damp and warm, favouring a rapid growth.

Colonel Gilbert had been unable to help them in this matter. His
official position necessarily prevented his taking an active part in any
local differences. There were Luccans, he said, to be hired at Bastia,
hard-working men and skilled vine-dressers, but they would not come to a
commune where such active hostility existed, and to induce them to do so
would inevitably lead to bloodshed.

The Abbé Susini had called, and told a similar tale in more guarded
language. Finding the ladies good Catholics, he pleaded for and abused
his poor in one breath, and then returned half the money that Denise gave
him.

“As likely as not you will be given credit for the whole in heaven,
mademoiselle, but I will only take part of it,” he said.

“A masterful man,” commented Mademoiselle Brun, when he was gone.

But the abbé had suggested no solution to Denise's difficulties. The
estate seemed to be drifting naturally into the hands of the only man who
wanted it, and, after all, had offered a good price for it.

“I will find out from the Abbé Susini or the mayor whether the Count de
Vasselot is really here,” Denise said, as they approached the village.
“And if he is, we will go and see him. We cannot go on like this. He says
do not sell, and then he does not come near us. He must give his reasons.
Why should I take his advice?”

“Why, indeed?” said Mademoiselle Brun, to whom the question was not quite
a new one.

She knew that though Denise would rebel against de Vasselot's advice, she
would continue to follow it.

“It seems to be luncheon-time,” said Denise, when they reached the
village. “The place is deserted. It must be their _déjeuner_.”

“It may be,” responded mademoiselle, with her manlike curtness of speech.

They went into the church, which was empty, and stayed but a few minutes
there, for Mademoiselle Brun was as short in her speech with God as with
men. When they came out to the market-place, that also was deserted,
which was singular, because the villagers in Corsica spend nearly the
whole day on the market-place, talking politics and whispering a hundred
intrigues of parochial policy; for here a municipal councillor is a great
man, and usually a great scoundrel, selling his favour and his vote,
trafficking for power, and misappropriating the public funds. Not only
was the market-place empty, but some of the house-doors were closed. The
door of a small shop was even shut from within as they approached, and
surreptitiously barred. Mademoiselle Brun noticed it, and Denise did not
pretend to ignore it.

“One would say that we had an infectious complaint,” she said, with a
short laugh.

They went to the house of the Abbé Susini. Even this door was shut.

“The abbé is out,” said the old woman, who came in answer to their
summons, and she closed the door again with more speed than politeness.

Denise did not need to ask which was the mayor's house, for a board, with
the word “Mairie” painted upon it (appropriately enough a movable board),
was affixed to a house nearly opposite to the church. As they walked
towards it, a stone, thrown from the far corner of the Place, under the
trees, narrowly missed Denise, and rolled at her feet. Mademoiselle Brun
walked on, but Denise swung round on her heel. There was no one to be
seen, so she had to follow Mademoiselle Brun, after all, in silence. She
was rather pale, but it was anger that lighted her eyes, and not fear.

Almost immediately a volley of stones followed, and a laugh rang out from
beneath the trees. And, strange to say, it was the laugh that at last
frightened Denise, and not the stones; for it was a cruel laugh--the
laugh of a brutal fool, such as one may still hear in a few European
countries when boys are torturing dumb animals.

“Let us hurry,” said Denise, hastily. “Let us get to the Mairie.”

“Where we shall find the biggest scoundrel of them all, no doubt,” added
mademoiselle, who was alert and cool.

But before they reached the Mairie the stones had ceased, and they both
turned at the sound of a horse's feet. It was Colonel Gilbert riding
hastily into the Place. He saw the stones lying there and the two women
standing alone in the sunlight. He looked towards the trees, and then
round at the closed houses. With a shrug of the shoulders, he rode
towards Denise and dismounted.

“Mademoiselle”, he said, “they have been frightening you.”

“Yes”, she answered. “They are not men, but brutes.”

The colonel, who was always gentle in manner, made a deprecatory gesture
with the great riding-whip that he invariably carried.

“You must remember”, he said, “that they are but half civilized. You know
their history--they have been conquered by all the greedy nations in
succession, and they have never known peace from the time that history
began until a hundred years ago. They are barbarians, mademoiselle, and
barbarians always distrust a new-comer.”

“But why do they hate me?”

“Because they do not know you, mademoiselle,” replied the colonel, with
perhaps a second meaning in his blue eyes.

And, after a pause, he explained further.

“Because they do not understand you. They belong to one of the strongest
clans in Corsica, and it is the ambition of every one to belong to a
strong clan. But the Peruccas are in danger of falling into dissension
and disorder, for they have no head. You are the head, mademoiselle. And
the work they expect of you is not work for such hands as yours.”

And again Colonel Gilbert looked at Denise slowly and thoughtfully. She
did not perceive the glance, for she was standing with her head half
turned towards the trees.

“Ah!” he said, noting the direction of her glance, “they will throw no
more stones, mademoiselle. You need have no anxiety. They fear a uniform
as much as they hate it.”

“And if you had not come at that moment?”

“Ah!” said the colonel, gravely; and that was all. “At any rate, I am
glad I came,” he added, in a lighter tone, after a pause. “You were going
to the Mairie, mesdemoiselles, when I arrived. Take my advice, and do not
go there. Go to the abbé if you like--as a man, not as a priest--and come
to me whenever you desire a service, but to no one else in Corsica.”

Denise turned as if she were going to make an exception to this sweeping
restriction, but she checked herself and said nothing. And all the while
Mademoiselle Brun stood by in silence, a little, patient, bent woman,
with compressed lips, and those steady hazel eyes that see so much and
betray so little.

“The abbé is not at home,” continued the colonel. “I saw him many miles
from here not long ago; and although he is quick on his legs--none
quicker--He cannot be here yet. If you are going towards the Casa
Perucca, you will perhaps allow me to accompany you”.

He led the way as he spoke, leading loosely by the bridle the horse which
followed him, and nuzzled thoughtfully at his shoulder. The colonel was,
it appeared, one whose gentle ways endeared him to animals.

It was glaringly hot, and when they reached the Casa Perucca, Denise
asked the colonel to come in and rest. It was, moreover, luncheon-time,
and in a thinly populated country the great distances between neighbours
are conducive to an easier hospitality than that which exists in closer
quarters. The colonel naturally stayed to luncheon.

He was kind and affable, and had a hundred little scraps of gossip such
as exiles love. He made no mention of his offer to buy Perucca,
remembered only the fact that he was a gentleman accepting frankly a
lady's frank hospitality, and if the conversation turned to local
matters, he gracefully guided it elsewhere.

Immediately after luncheon he rose from the table, refusing even to wait
for coffee.

“I have my duties,” he explained. “The War Office is, for reasons known
to itself, moving troops, and I have gradually crept up the ladder at
Bastia, till I am nearly at the top there.”

Denise went with him to the stable to see that his horse had been cared
for.

“They have only left me the decrepit and the half-witted,” she said, “but
I am not beaten yet.”

Colonel Gilbert fetched the horse himself and tightened the girths. They
walked together towards the great gate of solid wood which fitted into
the high wall so closely that none could peep through so much as a crack.
At the door the colonel lingered, leaning against his great horse and
stroking its shoulder thoughtfully with a gloved finger.

“Mademoiselle,” he said at length.

“Yes,” answered Denise, looking at him so honestly in the face that he
had to turn away.

“I want to ask you,” he said slowly, “to marry me.”

Denise looked at him in utter astonishment, her face suddenly red, her
eyes half afraid.

“I do not understand you,” she said.

“And yet it is simple enough,” answered the colonel, who himself was
embarrassed and ill at ease. “I ask you to marry me. You think I am too
old--” He paused, seeking his words. “I am not forty yet, and, at all
events, I am not making the mistake usually made by very young men. I do
not imagine that I love you--I know it.”

They stood for a minute in silence; then the colonel spoke again.

“Of what are you thinking, mademoiselle?”

“That it is hard to lose the only friend we have in Corsica.”

“You need not do that,” replied the colonel. “I do not even ask you to
answer now.”

“Oh, I can answer at once.”

Colonel Gilbert bit his lip, and looked at the ground in silence.

“Then I am too old?” he said at length.

“I do not know whether it is that or not,” answered Denise; and neither
spoke while the colonel mounted and rode slowly away. Denise closed the
door quite softly behind him.




CHAPTER XII.


A SUMMONS.

     “One stern tyrannic thought that made
     All other thoughts its slave.”


All round the Mediterranean Sea there dwell people who understand the art
of doing nothing. They do it unblushingly, peaceably, and of a set
purpose. Moreover, their forefathers must have been addicted to a similar
philosophy; for there is no Mediterranean town or village without its
promenade or lounging-place, where the trees have grown quite large, and
the shade is quite deep, and the wooden or stone seats are shiny with
use. Here those whom the French call “worth-nothings” congregate
peacefully and happily, to look at the sea and contemplate life from that
reflective and calm standpoint which is only to be enjoyed by the man who
has nothing to lose. To begin at Valentia, one will find these human
weeds almost Oriental in their apathy. Farther north, at Barcelona, they
are given to fitful lapses into activity before the heat of the day. At
Marseilles they are almost energetic, and are even known to take the
trouble of asking the passer for alms. But eastward, beyond Toulon, they
understand their business better, and do not even trouble to talk among
themselves. The French worth-nothing is, in a word, worth less than any
of his brothers--much less than the Italian, who is quite easily roused
to a display of temper and a rusty knife--and more nearly approaches the
supreme calm of the Moor, who, across the Mediterranean, will sit all day
and stare at nothing with any man in the world. And between these dreamy
coasts there lie half a dozen islands which, strange to say, are islands
of unrest. In Majorca every man works from morn till eve. In Minorca they
do the same, and quarrel after nightfall. In Iviza they quarrel all day.
In Corsica they do nothing, restlessly; while Sardinia, as all the world
knows, is a hotbed of active discontent.

At Ajaccio there are half a dozen idlers on the Place Bonaparte, who sit
under the trees against the wall; but they never sit there long, and do
not know their business. At St. Florent, in the north of the island,
which has a western aspect--the best for idling--there are but two real,
unadulterated knights of industry, who sit on the low wall of that which
is called the New Quay, and conscientiously do nothing from morning till
night.

“Of course I know him,” one was saying to the other. “Do I not remember
his father, and are not all the de Vasselots cut with the same knife? I
tell you there was a moon, and I saw him get off his horse, just here at
the very door of Rutali's stable, and unstrap his sack, which he carried
himself, and set off towards Olmeta.”

The speaker lapsed into silence, and Colonel Gilbert, who had lunched,
and was now sitting at the open window of the little inn, which has
neither sign nor license, leant farther forward. For the word “Olmeta”
 never failed to bring a light of energy and enterprise into his quiet
eyes.

The inn has its entrance in the main street of St. Florent, and only the
back windows look out upon the quay and across the bay. It was at one of
these windows that Colonel Gilbert was enjoying a cigarette and a cup of
coffee, and the loafers on the quay were unaware of his presence there.
And for the sixth time at least, the story of Lory de Vasselot's arrival
at St. Florent and departure for Olmeta was told and patiently heard. Has
not one of the great students of human nature said that the _canaille_ of
all nations are much alike? And the dull or idle of intellect assuredly
resemble each other in the patience with which they will listen to or
tell the same story over and over again.

The colonel heard the tale, listlessly gazing across the bay with dreamy
eyes, and only gave the talker his full attention when more ancient
history was touched upon.

“Yes,” said the idler; “and I remember his father when he was just at
that age--as like this one as one sheep is like another. Nor have I
forgotten the story which few remember now.”

He pressed down the tobacco into his wooden pipe--for they are
pipe-smokers in a cigarette latitude--and waited cunningly for curiosity
to grow. His companion showed no sign, though the colonel set his empty
coffee-cup noiselessly aside and leant his elbow on the window-sill.

The speaker jerked his thumb in the direction of Olmeta over his left
shoulder far up on the mountainside.

“That story was buried with Perucca,” he said, after a long pause.
“Perhaps the Abbé Susini knows it. Who can tell what a priest knows?
There were two Peruccas once--fine, big men--and neither married. The
other--Andrei Perucca--who has been in hell these thirty years, made
sheep's eyes, they told me, at de Vasselot's young wife. She was French,
and willing enough, no doubt. She was dull, down there in that great
chateau; and when a woman is dull she must either go to church or to the
devil. She cannot content herself with tobacco or the drink, like a man.
De Vasselot heard of it. He was a quiet man, and he waited. One day he
began to carry a gun, like you and me--a bad example, eh? Then Andrei
Perucca was seen to carry a gun also. And, of course, in time they
met--up there on the road from Pruneta to Murato. The clouds were down,
and the gregale was blowing cold and showery. It is when the gregale
blows that the clouds seem to whisper as they crowd through the narrow
places up among the peaks, and there was no other sound while these two
men crept round each other among the rocks, like two cats upon a roof. De
Vasselot was quicker and smaller, and as agile as a goat, and Andrei
Perucca lost him altogether. He was a fool. He went to look for him. As
if any one in his senses would go to look for a Corsican in the rocks!
That is how the gendarmes get killed. At length Andrei Perucca raised his
head over a big stone, and looked right into the muzzle of de Vasselot's
gun. The next minute there was no head upon Perucca's shoulders.”

The narrator paused, and relighted his pipe with a foul-smelling sulphur
match.

“Yes,” he said reflectively; “they are fine men, the de Vasselots.”

He tapped himself on the chest with the stem of his pipe, and made a
gesture towards the mountains and the sky, as if calling upon the gods to
hear him.

“I am all for the de Vasselots--I,” he said.

Colonel Gilbert leant out of the window, and quietly took stock of this
valuable adherent.

“At that time,” continued the speaker, “we had at Bastia a young prefect
who took himself seriously. He was going to reform the world. They
decided to arrest the Count de Vasselot, though they had not a scrap of
evidence, and the clan was strong in those days, stronger than the
Peruccas are to-day. But they never caught him. They disappeared bag and
baggage--went to Paris, I understand; and they say the count died there,
or was perhaps killed by the Peruccas, who grew strong under Mattei, so
that in a few years it would have been impossible for a de Vasselot to
show his face in this country. Then Mattei Perucca died, and was hardly
in his grave before this man came. I tell you, I saw him myself, a de
Vasselot, with his father's quick way of turning his head, of sitting in
the saddle lightly like a Spaniard or a Corsican. That was in the spring,
and it is now July--three months ago. And he has never been seen or heard
of since. But he is here, I tell you; he is here in the island. As likely
as not he is in the old chateau down there in the valley. No honest man
has set his foot across the threshold since the de Vasselots left it
thirty years ago--only Jean is there, who has the evil eye. But there are
plenty of Perucca's people up at Olmeta who would risk Jean's eye, and
break down the doors of the chateau at a word from the Casa Perucca. But
the girl there who is the head of the clan will not say the word. She
does not understand that she is powerful if she would only go to work in
the right way, and help her people. Instead of that, she quarrels with
them over such small matters as the right of grazing or of cutting wood.
She will make the place too hot for her--” He broke off suddenly. “What
is that?” he said, turning on the wall, which was polished smooth by
constant friction.

He turned to the north and listened, looking in the direction of Cap
Corse, from whence the Bastia road comes winding down the mountain
slopes.

“I hear nothing,” said his companion.

“Then you are deaf. It is the diligence half an hour before its time, and
the driver of it is shouting as he comes--shouting to the people on the
road. It seems that there is news--”

But Colonel Gilbert heard no more, for he had seized his sword, and was
already halfway down the stone stairs. It appeared that he expected news,
and when the diligence drew up in the narrow street, he was there
awaiting it, amid a buzzing crowd, which had inexplicably assembled in
the twinkling of an eye. Yes; there was assuredly news, for the diligence
came in at a gallop though there was no one on it but the driver. He
shouted incoherently, and waved his whip above his head. Then, quite
suddenly, perceiving Colonel Gilbert, he snapped his lips together, threw
aside the reins, and leapt to the ground.

“Mon colonel,” he said, “a word with you.”

And they went apart into a doorway. Three words sufficed to tell all that
the diligence driver knew, and a minute later the colonel hurried towards
the stable of the inn, where his horse stood ready. He rode away at a
sharp trot, not towards Bastia, but down the valley of Vasselot. Although
it was evident that he was pressed for time, the colonel did not hurry
his horse, but rather relieved it when he could by dismounting, at every
sharp ascent, and riding where possible in the deep shade of the chestnut
trees. He turned aside from the main road that climbs laboriously to
Oletta and Olmeta, and followed the river-path. In order to gain time he
presently left the path, and made a short cut across the open land,
glancing up at the Casa Perucca as he did so. For he was trespassing.

He was riding leisurely enough when his horse stumbled, and, in
recovering itself, clumsily kicked a great stone with such force that he
shattered it to a hundred pieces, and then stood on three legs, awkwardly
swinging his hoof in a way that horses have when the bone has been
jarred. In a moment the colonel dismounted, and felt the injured leg
carefully.

“My friend,” he said kindly, “you are a fool. What are you doing? Name of
a dog”--he paused, and collecting the pieces of broken quartz, threw them
away into the brush--“name of a dog, what are you doing?”

With an odd laugh Colonel Gilbert climbed into the saddle again, and
although he looked carefully up at the Casa Perucca, he failed to see
Mademoiselle Brun's grey face amid the grey shadows of an olive tree. The
horse limped at first, but presently forgot his grievance against the big
stone that had lain in his path. The colonel laughed to himself in a
singular way more than once at the seemingly trivial accident, and on
regaining the path, turned in his saddle to look again at the spot where
it had occurred.

On nearing the chateau he urged his horse to a better pace, and reached
the great door at a sharp trot. He rang the bell without dismounting, and
leisurely quitted the saddle. But the summons was not immediately
answered. He jerked at the chain again, and rattled on the door with the
handle of his riding whip. At length the bolts were withdrawn, and the
heavy door opened sufficiently to admit a glance of that evil eye which
the peasants did not care to face.

Before speaking the colonel made a step forward, so that his foot must
necessarily prevent the closing of the door.

“The Count de Vasselot,” said he.

“Take away your foot,” replied Jean.

The colonel noted with a good-natured surprise the position of his stout
riding-boot, and withdrew it.

“The Count de Vasselot,” he repeated. “You need not trouble, my friend,
to tell any lies or to look at me with your evil eye. I know the count is
here, for I saw him in Paris just before he came, and I spoke to him at
this very door a few weeks ago. He knows me, and I think you know me too,
my friend. Tell your master I have news from France. He will see me.”

Jean unceremoniously closed the door, and the colonel, who was moving
away towards his horse, turned sharply on his heel when he heard the
bolts being surreptitiously pushed back again.

“Ah!” he said, and he stood outside the door with his hand at his
moustache, reflectively following Jean's movements, “they are singularly
careful to keep me out, these people.”

He had not long to wait, however, for presently Lory came, stepping
quickly over the high threshold and closing the door behind him. But
Gilbert was taller than de Vasselot, and could see over his head. He
looked right through the house into the little garden on the terrace, and
saw someone there who was not Jean. And the light of surprise was still
in his eyes as he shook hands with Lory de Vasselot.

“You have news for me?” inquired de Vasselot.

“News for every Frenchman.”

“Ah!”

“Yes. The emperor has declared war against Germany.”

“War!” echoed Lory, with a sudden laugh.

“Yes; and your regiment is the first on the list.”

“I know, I know!” cried de Vasselot, his eyes alight with excitement.
“But this is good news that you tell me. How can I thank you for coming?
I must get home--I mean to France--at once. But this is great news!” He
seized the colonel's hand and shook it. “Great news, mon colonel--great
news!”

“Good news for you, for you are going. But I shall be left behind as
usual. Yes; it is good news for you.”

“And for France,” cried Lory, with both hands outspread, as if to
indicate the glory that was awaiting them.

“For France,” said the colonel, gravely, “it cannot fail to be bad. But
we must not think of that now.”

“We shall never think of it,” answered Lory. “This is Monday; there is a
boat for Marseilles to-night. I leave Bastia to-night, colonel.”

“And I must get back there,” said the colonel, holding out his hand.

He rode thoughtfully back by the shortest route through the Lancone
Defile, and, as he approached Bastia, from the heights behind the town he
saw the steamer that would convey Lory to France coming northward from
Bonifacio.

“Yes,” he said; “he will leave Bastia to-night; and assuredly the good
God, or the devil, helps me at every turn of this affair.”




CHAPTER XIII.


WAR.

     “Since all that I can ever do for thee
     Is to do nothing, may'st thou never see,
     Never divine, the all that nothing costeth me!”


It is for kings to declare war, for nations to fight and pay. Napoleon
III declared war against Russia, and France fought side by side with
England in the Crimea, not because the gayest and most tragic of nations
had aught to gain, but to ensure an upstart emperor a place among the
monarchs of Europe. And that strange alliance was merely one move in a
long game played by a consummate intriguer--a game which began
disastrously at Boulogne and ended disastrously at Sedan, and yet was the
most daring and brilliant feat of European statesmanship that has been
carried out since the adventurer's great uncle went to St. Helena.

But no one knows why in July, 1870, Napoleon III declared war against
Germany. The secret of the greatest war of modern times lies buried in
the Imperial mausoleum at Frognal.

There is a sort of surprise which is caused by the sudden arrival of the
long expected, and Germany experienced it in that hot midsummer, for
there seemed to be no reason why war should break out at the moment.
Shortly before, the Spanish Government had offered the crown to the
hereditary Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern, and France, ever ready to see
a grievance, found herself suited. But the hereditary prince declined
that throne, and the incident seemed about to close. Then quite suddenly
France made a demand, with reference to any possible recurrence of the
same question, which Germany could not be expected to grant. It was an
odd demand to make, and in a flash of thought the great German chancellor
saw that this meant war. Perhaps he had been waiting for it. At all
events, he was prepared for it, as were the silent soldier, von Roon, and
the gentle tactician, von Moltke. These gentlemen were away for a
holiday, but they returned, and, as history tells, had merely to fill in
a few dates on already prepared documents.

If France was not ready she thought herself so, and was at all events
willing. Nay, she was so eager that she shouted when she should have held
her tongue. And who shall say what the schemer of the Tuileries thought
of it all behind that pleasant smile, those dull and sphinx-like eyes? He
had always believed in his star, had always known that he was destined to
be great; and now perhaps he knew that his star was waning--that the
greatness was past. He made his preparations quietly. He was never a
flustered man, this nephew of the greatest genius the world has seen. Did
he not sit three months later in front of a cottage at Donchery and
impassively smoke cigarette after cigarette while waiting for Otto von
Bismarck? He was a fatalist.

“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on.”

And it must be remembered to his credit that he asked no man's pity--a
request as foolish to make for a fallen emperor as for the ordinary man
who has, for instance, married in haste, and is given the leisure of a
whole lifetime in which to repent. For the human heart is incapable of
bestowing unadulterated pity: there must be some contempt in it. If the
fall of Napoleon III was great, let it be remembered that few place
themselves by their own exertions in a position to fall at all.

The declaration of war was, on the whole, acclaimed in France; for
Frenchmen are, above all men, soldiers. Does not the whole world use
French terms in the technicalities of warfare? The majority received the
news as Lory de Vasselot received it. For a time he could only think that
this was a great and glorious moment in his life. He hurried in to tell
his father, but the count failed to rise to the occasion.

“War!” he said. “Yes; there have been many in my time. They have not
affected me--or my carnations.”

“And I go to it to-night,” announced Lory, watching his father with eyes
suddenly grave and anxious.

“Ah!” said the count, and made no farther comment.

Then, without pausing to consider his own motives, Lory hurried up to the
Casa Perucca to tell the ladies there his great news. He must, it seemed,
tell somebody, and he knew no one else within reach, except perhaps the
Abbé Susini, who did not pretend to be a Frenchman.

“Is it peace?” asked Mademoiselle Brun, who, having seen him climbing the
steep slope in the glaring sunshine, was waiting for him by the open
side-door when he arrived there.

He took her withered hand, and bowed over it as gallantly as if it had
been soft and young.

“What do you mean?” he asked, looking at her curiously.

“Well, it seems that the Casa Perucca and the Château de Vasselot are not
on visiting terms. We only call on each other with a gun.”

“It is odd that you should have asked me that,” said Lory, “for it is not
peace, but war.”

And as he looked at her, her face hardened, her steady eyes wavered for
once.

“Ah!” she said, her hands dropping sharply against her dingy black dress
in a gesture of despair. “Again!”

“Yes, mademoiselle,” answered Lory, gently; for he had a quick intuition,
and knew at a glance that war must have hurt this woman at one time of
her life.

She stood for a moment tapping the ground with her foot, looking
reflectively across the valley.

“Assuredly,” she said, “Frenchwomen must be the bravest women in the
world, or else there would never be a light heart in the whole country.
Come, let us go in and tell Denise. It is Germany, I suppose?”

“Yes, mademoiselle. They have long wanted it, and we are obliging them at
last. You look grave. It is not bad news I bring you, but good.”

“Women like soldiers, but they hate war,” said mademoiselle, and walked
on slowly in silence.

After a pause, she turned and looked at him as if she were going to ask
him a question, but checked herself.

“I almost did a foolish thing,” she explained, seeing his glance of
surprise. “I was going to ask you if you were going?”

“Ah, yes, I am going,” he answered, with a laugh and a keen glance of
excitement. “War is a necessary evil, mademoiselle, and assists
promotion. Why should you hate it?”

“Because we cannot interfere in it,” replied Mademoiselle Brun, with a
snap of the lips. “We shall find Denise in the garden to the north of the
house, picking green beans, Monsieur le Comte,” continued Mademoiselle
Brun, with a glance in his direction.

“Then I shall have time to help with the beans before I go to the war,”
 answered Lory; and they walked on in silence.

The garden was but half cultivated--a luxuriant thicket of fruit and
weed, of trailing vine and wild clematis. The air of it was heavy with a
hundred scents, and, in the shade, was cool, and of a mossy odour rarely
found in Southern seas.

They did not see Denise at first, and then suddenly she emerged at the
other end of the weed-grown path where they stood. Lory hurried forward,
hat in hand, and perceived that Denise made a movement, as if to go back
into the shadow, which was immediately restrained.

Mademoiselle Brun did not follow Lory, but turned back towards the house.

“If they must quarrel,” she said to herself, “they may do it without my
assistance.”

And Denise seemed, indeed, ready to fall out with her neighbour, for she
came towards him with heightened colour and a flash of annoyance in her
eyes.

“I am sorry they put you to the trouble of coming out here,” she said.

“Why, mademoiselle? Because I find you picking green beans?”

“No; not that. But one has one's pride. This is my garden. I keep it!
Look at it!” And she waved her hand with a gesture of contempt.

De Vasselot looked gravely round him. Then, after a pause, he made a
movement of the deepest despair.

“Yes, mademoiselle,” he said, with a great sigh, “it is a wilderness.”

“And now you are laughing at me.”

“I, mademoiselle?” And he faced her tragic eyes.

“You think I am a woman.”

De Vasselot spread out his hands in deprecation, as if, this time, she
had hit the mark.

“Yes,” he said slowly.

“I mean you think we are only capable of wearing pretty clothes and
listening to pretty speeches, and that anything else is beyond our grasp
altogether.”

“Nothing in the world, mademoiselle, is beyond your grasp, except”--he
paused, and looked round him--“except a spade, perhaps, and that is what
this garden wants.”

They were very grave about it, and sat down on a rough seat built by
Mattei Perucca, who had come there in the hot weather.

“Then what is to be done?” said Denise, simply.

For the French--the most intellectually subtle people of the world--have
a certain odd simplicity which seems to have survived all the changes and
chances of monarchy, republic, and empire.

“I do not quite know. Have you not a man?”

“I have nobody, except a decrepit old man, who is half an imbecile,” said
Denise, with a short laugh. “I get my provisions surreptitiously by the
hand of Madame Andrei. No one else comes near the Casa. We are in a state
of siege. I dare not go into Olmeta; but I am holding on because you
advised me not to sell.”

“I, mademoiselle?”

“Yes; in Paris. Have you forgotten?”

“No,” answered Lory, slowly--“no; I have not forgotten. But no one takes
my advice--indeed, no one asks it--except about a horse. They think I
know about a horse.” And Lory smiled to himself at the thought of his
proud position.

“But you surely meant what you said?” asked Denise.

“Oh yes. But you honour me too much by taking my opinion thus seriously
without question, mademoiselle.”

Denise was looking at him with her clear, searching eyes, rather veiled
by a suggestion of disappointment.

“I thought--I thought you seemed so decided, so sure of your own
opinion,” she said doubtfully.

De Vasselot was silent for a moment, then he turned to her quickly,
impulsively, confidentially.

“Listen,” he said. “I will tell you the truth. I said 'Don't sell.' I say
'Don't sell' still. And I have not a shred of reason for doing so.
There!”

Denise was not a person who was easily led. She laughed at the stern,
strong Mademoiselle Brun to her face, and treated her opinion with a gay
contempt. She had never yet been led.

“No,” she said, and seemed ready to dispense with reasons. “You will not
sell, yourself?” she said, after a pause.

“No; I cannot sell,” he said quickly; and she remembered his answer long
afterwards.

After a pause he explained farther.

“I tell you frankly,” he said earnestly, for he was always either very
earnest or very gay--“I tell you frankly, when we both received an offer
to buy, I thought there must be some reason why the places are worth
buying, but I have found none.”

He paused, and, looking round, remembered that this also was his, and did
not belong to Denise at all, who claimed it, and held it with such a high
hand.

“As Corsica at present stands, Perucca and Vasselot are valueless,
mademoiselle, I claim the honour of being in the same boat with you. And
if the empire falls--_bonjour la paix!_”

And he sketched a grand upheaval with a wave of his two hands in the air.

“But why should the empire fall?” asked Denise, sharply.

“Ah, but I have the head of a sparrow!” cried Lory, and he smote himself
grievously on the forehead. “I forgot to tell you the very thing that I
came to tell you. Which is odd, for until I came into this garden I could
think of nothing else. I was ready to shout it to the trees. War has been
declared, mademoiselle.”

“War!” said Denise; and she drew in one whistling breath through her
teeth, as one may who has been burnt by contact with heated metal, and
sat looking straight in front of her. “When do you go, Monsieur le
Comte?” she asked, in a steady voice, after a moment.

“To-night.”

He rose, and stood before her, looking at the tangled garden with a
frown.

“Ah!” he said, with a sudden laugh, “if the emperor had only consulted
me, he would not have done it just yet. I want to go, of course, for I am
a soldier. But I do not want to go now. I should have liked to see things
more settled, here in Olmeta. If the empire falls, mademoiselle, you must
return to France; remember that. I should have liked to have offered you
my poor assistance; but I cannot--I must go. There are others, however.
There is Mademoiselle Brun, with a man's heart in that little body. And
there is the Abbé Susini. Yes; you can trust him as you can trust a
little English fighting terrier. Tell him----No; I will tell him. He is a
Vasselot, mademoiselle, but I shall make him a Perucca.”

He held out his hand gaily to say good-bye.

“And--stay! Will you write to me if you want me, mademoiselle? I may be
able to get to you.”

Denise did not answer for a moment. Then she looked him straight in the
eyes, as was her wont with men and women alike.

“Yes,” she said.

A few minutes later, Mademoiselle Brun came into the garden. She looked
round but saw no one. Approaching the spot where she had left Denise, she
found the basket with a few beans in it, and Denise's gloves lying there.
She knew that Lory had gone, but still she could see Denise nowhere.
There were a hundred places in the garden where any who did not wish to
be discovered could find concealment.

Mademoiselle Brun took up the basket and continued to pick the French
beans.

“My poor child! my poor child!” she muttered twice, with a hard face.




CHAPTER XIV.


GOSSIP.

     “Cupid is a casuist,
      A mystic, and a cabalist.
      Can your lurking thought surprise,
      And interpret your device?”


That which has been taken by the sword must be held by the sword. In
Corsica the blade is sheathed, but it has never yet been laid aside. The
quick events of July thrust this sheathed weapon into the hand of Colonel
Gilbert, who, as he himself had predicted, was left behind in the general
exodus.

“If you are placed in command at Bastia, how many, or how few men will
suffice?” asked the civil authority, who was laid on the shelf by the
outbreak of war.

And Colonel Gilbert named what appeared to be an absurd minimum.

“We must think of every event; things may go badly, the fortune of war
may turn against us.”

“Still I can do it,” answered the colonel.

“The empire may fall, and then Corsica will blaze up like tow.”

“Still I can do it,” repeated the colonel.

It is the natural instinct of man to strike while his blood is up, and
the national spirit on either side of the Rhine was all for immediate
action. The leaders themselves were anxious to begin, so that they might
finish before the winter. So the preparations were pushed forward in
Germany with a methodical haste, a sane and deliberate foresight. In
France it was more a question of sentiment--the invincibility of French
arms, the heroism of French soldiers, the Napoleonic legend. But while
these abstract aids to warfare may make a good individual soldier of that
untidy little man in the red trousers, who has, in his time, overrun all
Europe, it will not move great armies or organize a successful campaign.
For the French soldier must have some one to fight for--some one towering
man in whom he trusts, who can turn to good account some of the best
fighting material the human race has yet produced. And Napoleon III was
not such a man.

It is almost certain that he counted on receiving assistance from Austria
or Italy, and when this was withheld, the disease-stricken, suffering man
must assuredly have realized that his star was sinking. He had made the
mistake of putting off this great war too long. He should have fought it
years earlier, before the Prussians had made sure of those steady,
grumbling Bavarians, who bore the brunt of all the fighting, before his
own hand was faltering at the helm, and the face of God was turned away
from the Napoleonic dynasty.

The emperor was no tactician, but he knew the human heart. He knew that
at any cost France must lead off with a victory, not only for the sake of
the little man in the red trousers, but to impress watching Europe, and
perhaps snatch an ally from among the hesitating powers. And the result
was Saarbrück. The news of it filtered through to Colonel Gilbert, who
was now quartered in the grey, picturesque Watrin barracks at Bastia,
which jut out between the old harbour and the plain of Biguglia. The
colonel did not believe half of it. It is always safe to subtract from
good news. But he sat down at once and wrote to Denise Lange. He had not
seen her, had not communicated with her, since he had asked her to marry
him, and she had refused. He was old enough to be her father. He had
asked her to marry him because she would not sell Perucca, and he wanted
that estate; which was not the right motive, but it is the usual one with
men who are past the foolishness of youth--that foolishness which is
better than all the wisdom of the ages.

From having had nothing to do, Colonel Gilbert found himself thrown into
a whirl of work, or what would have been a whirl with a man less calm and
placid. Very much at ease, in white linen clothes, he sat in his room in
the bastion, and transacted the affairs of his command with a leisurely
good nature which showed his complete grasp of the situation.

With regard to Denise, this middle-aged, cynical Frenchman grasped the
situation also. He was slowly and surely falling in love with her. And
she herself had given him the first push down that facile descent when
she had refused to be his wife.

“Mademoiselle,” he wrote, “to quarrel is, I suppose, in the air of
Corsica, and when we parted at your gate some time ago, I am afraid I
left you harbouring a feeling of resentment against me. At this time, and
in the adverse days that I foresee must inevitably be in store for
France, none can afford to part with friends who by any means can
preserve them. In our respective positions, you and I must rise above
small differences of opinion; and I place myself unreservedly at your
service. I write to tell you that I have this morning good news from
France. We have won a small victory at Saarbrück. So far, so good. But,
in case of a reverse, there is only too much reason to fear that internal
disturbances will arise in France, and consequently in this unfortunate
island. It is, therefore, my duty to urge upon you the necessity of
quitting Perucca without delay. If you will not consent to leave the
island, come at all events into Bastia, where, at a few minutes' notice,
I shall be able to place you in a position of safety. I trust I am not
one who is given to exaggerating danger. Ask Mademoiselle Brun, who has
known me since, as a young man, I had the privilege of serving under your
father, a general who had the gift of drawing out from those about him
such few soldierly qualities as they might possess.”

Denise received this letter by post the next morning, and, after reading
it twice, handed it to Mademoiselle Brun, who was much too wise a woman
to ask for an explanation of those parts of it which she did not
comprehend. Indeed, she was manlike enough to pass on with an unimpaired
understanding to the second part of the letter, whereas most women would
have been so consumed by curiosity as to be unable to give more than half
their mind to the colonel's further news.

“And--?” inquired mademoiselle--a Frenchwoman's way of asking a thousand
questions in one. Mademoiselle Brun knew all the conversational tricks
that serve to economize words.

“It is all based upon supposition,” said the erstwhile mathematical
instructress of the school in the Rue du Cherche-Midi. “It will be time
enough to arrive at a decision when the reverse comes. The Count de
Vasselot or the Abbé Susini will, no doubt, warn us in time.”

“Ah!” said Mademoiselle Brun.

“But, if you like, I will write to the Count de Vasselot,” said Denise,
in the voice of one making a concession.

Mademoiselle Brun thought deeply before replying. It is so easy to take a
wrong turning at the cross-roads of life, and assuredly Denise stood at a
_carrefour_ now.

“Yes,” said mademoiselle at length; “it would be well to do that.”

And Denise went away to write the letter that Lory had asked for in case
she wanted him. She did not show it to Mademoiselle Brun, but went out
and posted it herself in the little square box, painted white, affixed to
the white wall on the high-road, and just within sight of Olmeta. When
she returned she went into the garden again, where she spent so great a
part of these hot days that her face was burnt to a healthy brown, which
was in keeping with her fearless eyes and carriage. Mademoiselle Brun, on
the other hand, spent most of her days indoors, divining perhaps that
Denise had of late fallen into an unconscious love of solitude.

Denise returned to the house at luncheon-time, entered by the window, and
caught Mademoiselle Brun hastily shutting an atlas.

“I was wondering,” she said, “where Saarbrück might be, and whether any
one we know had time to get there before the battle.”

“Yes.”

“But Colonel Gilbert will tell us.”

“Colonel Gilbert?” inquired Denise, turning rather sharply.

“Yes. I think he will come to-day or to-morrow.”

And Mademoiselle Brun was right. In the full heat of the afternoon the
great bell at the gate gave forth a single summons; for the colonel was
always gentle in his ways.

“I made an opportunity,” he said, “to escape from the barracks this hot
day.”

But he looked cool enough, and greeted Denise with his usual leisurely,
friendly bow. His manner conveyed, better than any words, that she need
feel no uneasiness on his account, and could treat him literally at his
word, as a friend.

“In order to tell you, with all reserve, the good news,” he continued.

“With all reserve!” echoed Mademoiselle Brun.

“Good news in a French newspaper, Mademoiselle--” And he finished with a
gesture eloquent of the deepest distrust.

“I was wondering,” said Mademoiselle Brun, speaking slowly, and in a
manner that demanded for the time the colonel's undivided attention,
“whether our friend the Count de Vasselot could have been at Saarbrück.”

“The Count de Vasselot,” said Colonel Gilbert, with an air of friendly
surprise. “Has he quitted his beloved château? He is so attached to that
old house, you know.”

“He has joined his regiment,” replied Mademoiselle Brun, upon whom the
burden of the conversation fell; for Denise had gone to the open window,
and was closing the shutters against the sun.

“Ah! Then I can tell you that he was not at Saarbrück. The count's
regiment is not in that part of the country. I was forgetting that he was
a soldier. He is, by the way, your nearest neighbour.”

The colonel rose as he spoke, and went to the window--not to that where
Denise was standing, but to the other, of which the sun-blinds were only
half closed.

“You can, of course, see the château from here?” he said musingly.

“Yes,” answered Mademoiselle Brun, with an uneasy glance.

What was Colonel Gilbert going to say?

He stood for a moment looking down into the valley, while Denise and
Mademoiselle Brun waited.

“And you have perceived nothing that would seem to confirm the gossip
current regarding your--enemy?” he asked, with a good-natured,
deprecatory laugh.

“What gossip?” asked mademoiselle, bluntly.

The colonel shrugged his shoulders without looking round.

“Oh,” he answered, “one does not believe all one hears. Besides, there
are many who think that in such a remote spot as Corsica, it is not
necessary to observe the ordinary--what shall I say?--etiquette of
society.”

He laughed uneasily, and spread out his hands as if, for his part, he
would rather dismiss the subject. But Mademoiselle Brun could be frankly
feminine at times.

“What is the gossip to which you refer?” she asked again.

“Oh, I do not believe a word of it--though I, myself, have seen. Well,
mademoiselle--you will excuse my frankness?--they say there is some one
in the château--some one whom the count wishes to conceal, you
understand.”

“Ah!” said mademoiselle, indifferently.

Denise said nothing. She was looking out of the window with a face as
hard as the face of Mademoiselle Brun. She looked at her watch, seemed to
make a quick mental calculation, and then turned and spoke to Colonel
Gilbert with steady, smiling eyes.

“You have not told us your war news yet,” she said.

So he told them what he knew, which, as a matter of fact, did not amount
to much. Then he took his leave, and rode home in the cool of the
evening--a solitary, brooding man, who had missed his way somehow early
on the road of life, and lacked perhaps the strength of mind to go back
and try again.

Denise said good-bye to him in the same friendly spirit which he had
inaugurated. She was standing with her back to the window from which she
had looked down on to the château of Vasselot while Colonel Gilbert
related his idle gossip respecting that house. And Mademoiselle Brun, who
remembered such trifles, noted that she never looked out of that window
again, but avoided it as one would avoid a cupboard where there is a
skeleton.

Denise, who consulted her watch again so soon as the colonel had left,
wrote another letter, which she addressed in an open envelope to the
postmaster at Marseilles, and enclosed a number of stamps. She went out
on to the high-road, and waited there in the shade of the trees for the
diligence, which would pass at four o'clock on its way to Bastia.

The driver of the diligence, like many who are on the road and have but a
passing glimpse 

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