“Before man made us citizens, great Nature made us men.”
The Abbé Susini had no money, but he was a charitable man in a hasty and impulsive way. Even the very poor may be charitable: they can think kindly of the rich. It was not the rich of whom the abbé had a friendly thought, but the foolish and the stubborn. For this fiery little priest knew more of the unwritten history of the macquis than any in Corsica—infinitely more than those whose business it was.
It is the custom at Ajaccio, and in a smaller way at Bastia, to ignore the darker side of Corsican politics, and the French officials are content with the endeavour to get through their term of office with a whole skin. It is not, as in other islands of the Mediterranean, the gospel of “mañana” which holds good here, but rather the gospel of “So I found it—it will last my time.” So, from the préfet to the humblest gendarme, they come, they serve, and they go back rejoicing to France. They strike when absolutely forced to do so, but they commit the most fatal of all administrative errors—they strike gently.
The faults are not all on one side; for the islanders are at once turbulent and sullen. There are many who “keep the country,” as the local saying is, and wander year after year in the mountain fastnesses, far above road or pathway, beyond the feeble reach of the law, rather than pay a trifling fine or bend their pride to face a week's imprisonment.
In the macquis, as in better society, there are grades of evil. Some are hiding from their own pride, others are evading a lifelong sentence, while many know that if the gendarme sees them he will shoot at sight—running, standing, sleeping, as a keeper kills vermin. Only a few months ago, on a road over which many tourists must have travelled, a young man of twenty-three was “destroyed” (the official term) by the gendarmes who wanted him for eleven murders. It is commonly asserted that these bandits are not dangerous, that they have no grievance against travellers. A starving man has a grievance against the whole world, and a condemned fratricide is not likely to pick and choose his next victim if tempted by a little money and the chance of escape therewith from the island.
It is, moreover, usual for a man to take to the macquis the moment that he finds himself involved in some trouble, or, it may be, merely under suspicion. From his retreat in the mountains he enters into negotiations with his lawyer, with the local magistrate, with his witnesses, even with the police. He distrusts justice itself, and only gives himself up or faces the tribunal when he has made sure of acquittal or such a sentence as his pride may swallow. Which details of justice as understood in a province of France at the beginning of the century may be read at the Assize terms in those great newspapers,Le Petit BastiaisorLe Paoli Pascal, by any who have a halfpenny to spend on literature.
It would appear easy enough to exterminate the bandits as one would exterminate wolves or other large game; but in such a country as Corsica, almost devoid of roads, thinly populated, heavily wooded, the expense would be greater than the administration is prepared to incur. It would mean putting an army into the field, prepared and equipped for a long campaign which might ultimately reach the dignity of a civil war. The bandits are not worth it. The whole country is not worth exploiting. Corsica is a small open wound on the great back of France, carefully concealed and only tended spasmodically from time to time at such periods as the health of the whole frame is sufficiently good to permit of serious attention being given to so small a sore. And such times, as the wondering world knows, are few and far between in the history of France.
The law-abiding natives, or such natives as the law has not found out, regard the denizens of the macquis with a tender pity not unmixed with respect. As often as not the bandit is a man with a real grievance, and the poor have a soft place in their hearts for a man with a grievance. And all Corsicans are poor. So all are for the bandits, and every man's hand is secretly or openly against the gendarme. Even in enmity, there is a certain sense of honour among these naïve people. A man will shoot his foe in the back, but he will not betray him to the gendarme. Among a primitive people a man commands respect who has had the courage to take the law into his own hands. Amidst a subject population, he who rebels is not without honour.
It was among these and such as these that the Abbé Susini sought from time to time his lost sheep. He took a certain pleasure in donning the peasant clothes that his father had worn, and in going to the mountains as his forefathers had doubtless done before him. For every man worthy of the name has lurking in his being a remnant of the barbarian which makes him revolt occasionally against the life of the city and the crowded struggle of the streets, which sends him out to the waste places of the world where God's air is at all events untainted, where he may return to the primitive way of living, to kill and gather with his own hands that which must satisfy his own hunger.
The abbé had never known a very highly refined state of civilization. The barbarian was not buried very deep. To him the voice of the wind through the trees, the roar of the river, the fine, free air of the mountains had a charm which he could not put into words. He hungered for them as the exile hungers for the sight of his own home. The air of houses choked him, as sooner or later it seems to choke sailors and wanderers who have known what it is to be in the open all night, sleeping or waking beneath the stars, not by accident as an adventure, but by habit. Then the abbé would disappear for days together from Olmeta, and vanish into that mystic, silent, prowling world of the macquis. The sights he saw there, the men he met there, were among those things which the villagers said the abbé knew, but of which he never spoke.
During the stirring events of August and September the priest at Olmeta, and Colonel Gilbert at Bastia, watched each, in his individual way, the effect of the news upon a very sensitive populace. The abbé stood on the high-road one night within a stone's throw of Perucca, and, looking down into the great valley, watched the flickering flames consume all that remained of the old Château de Vasselot. Colonel Gilbert, in his little rooms in the bastion at Bastia, knew almost as soon that the château was burning, and only evinced his usual easy-going surprise. The colonel always seemed to be wondering that any should have the energy to do active wrong; for virtue is more often passive, and therefore less trouble.
The abbé was puzzled.
“An empty house,” he muttered, “does not set itself on fire. Who has done this? and why?”
For he knew every drift and current of feeling amid his turbulent flock, and the burning of the château of Vasselot seemed to serve no purpose, and to satisfy no revenge. There was some influence at work which the Abbé Susini did not understand.
He understood well enough that a hundred grievances—a hundred unsatisfied vengeances—had suddenly been awakened by the events of the last months. The grip of France was for a moment relaxed, and all Corsica arose from its sullen sleep, not in organized revolt, but in the desire to satisfy personal quarrels—to break in one way or another the law which had made itself so dreaded. The burning of the Château de Vasselot might be the result of some such feeling; but the abbé thought otherwise.
He went to Perucca, where all seemed quiet, though he did not actually ring the great bell and speak to the widow Andrei.
A few hours later, after nightfall, he set off on foot by the road that leads to the Lancone Defile. But he did not turn to the left at the cross-roads. He went straight on instead, by the track which ultimately leads to Corte, in the middle of the island, and amidst the high mountains. This is one of the loneliest spots in all the lonely island, where men may wander for days and never see a human being. The macquis is thin here, and not considered a desirable residence. In fact, the mildest malefactor may have a whole mountain to himself without any demonstration of violence whatever.
This was not the abbé's destination. He was going farther, where the ordinary traveller would fare worse, and hurried along without looking to the left or right. A half-moon was peeping through an occasional rift in those heavy clouds which precede the autumn rains in these latitudes, and gather with such astonishing slowness and deliberation. It was not a dark night, and the air was still. The abbé had mounted considerably since leaving the cross-roads. His path now entered a valley between two mountains. On either side rose a sharp slope, broken, and rendered somewhat inaccessible by boulders, which had at one time been spilled down the mountain-side by some great upheaval, and now seemed poised in patient expectance of the next disturbance.
Suddenly the priest stopped, and stood rooted. A faint sound, inaudible to a townsman's ear, made him turn sharply to the right, and face the broken ground. A stone no bigger than a hazel nut had been dislodged somewhere above him, and now rolled down to his feet. The dead silence of the mountains closed over him again. There was, of course, no one in sight.
“It is Susini of Olmeta,” he said, speaking quietly, as if he were in a room.
There was a moment's pause, and then a man rose from behind a rock, and came silently on bare feet down to the pathway. His approach was heralded by a scent which would have roused any sporting dog to frenzy. This man was within measurable distance of the beasts of the forests. As he came into the moonlight it was perceivable that he was hatless, and that his tangled hair and beard were streaked with white. His face was apparently black, and so were his hands. He had obviously not washed himself for years.
“You here,” said the abbé, recognizing one who had for years and years been spoken of as a sort of phantom, living in the summits—the life of an animal—alone.
The other nodded.
“Then you have heard that the gendarmes are being drafted into the army, and sent to France?”
The man nodded again. He had done so long without speech that he had no doubt come to recognize its uselessness in the majority of human happenings. The abbé felt in his pocket, and gave the man a packet of tobacco. The Corsicans, unlike nearly all other races of the Mediterranean, are smokers of wooden pipes.
“Thanks,” said the man, in an odd, soft voice, speaking for the first time.
“I am going up into the mountains,” said the abbé, slowly, knowing no doubt that men who have lived long with Nature are slow to understand words, “to seek an old man who has recently gone there. He is travelling with a man called Jean, who has the evil eye.”
“The Count de Vasselot,” said the outlaw, quietly. He touched his forehead with one finger and made a vague wandering gesture of the hand. “I have seen him. You go the wrong way. He is down there, near the entrance to the Lancone Defile with others.”
He paused and looked round him with the slow and distant glance which any may perceive in the eyes of a caged wild beast.
“They are all down from the mountains,” he said.
Even the Abbé Susini glanced uneasily over his shoulder. These still, stony valleys were peopled by the noiseless, predatory Ishmaels of the macquis. They were, it is true, not numerous at this time, but those who had escaped the clutch of the imperial law were necessarily the most cunning and desperate.
“Buon,” he said, turning to retrace his steps. “I shall go down to the Lancone Defile. God be with you, my friend.”
The man gave a queer laugh. He evidently thought that the abbé expected too much.
The abbé walked until midnight, and then being tired he found a quiet spot between two great rocks, and lying down slept there until morning. In the leather saddle-bag which formed his pillow he had bread and some meat, which he ate as he walked on towards the Lancone Defile. Once, soon after daylight, he paused to listen, and the sound that had faintly reached him was repeated. It was the warning whistle of the steamer, the oldPersévérance, entering Bastia harbour ten miles away. He was still in the shade of the great heights that lay between him and the Eastern coast, and hurried while the day was cool. Then the sun leapt up behind the hazy summits above Biguglia. The abbé looked at his huge silver watch. It was nearly eight o'clock. When he was near to the entrance of the defile he stood in the middle of the road and gave, in his high clear voice, the cry of the goat-herd calling his flock. He gave it twice, and then repeated it. If there were any in the macquis within a mile of him they could not fail to see him as he stood on the dusty road in the sunlight.
He was not disappointed. In a few minutes the closely-set arbutus bushes above the road were pushed aside and a boy came out—an evil-faced youth with a loose mouth.
“It is Jean of the Evil Eye who has sent me,” he said glibly, with an eye on the abbé's hands in case there should be a knife. “He is up there with a broken leg. He has with him the old man.”
“The old man?” repeated the abbé, interrogatively.
“Yes, he who is foolish.”
“Show me the way,” said Susini. “You need not look at my hands; I have nothing in them.”
They climbed the steep slope that overhung the road, forcing their way through the thick brushwood, stumbling over the chaos of stones. Quite suddenly they came upon a group of men sitting round a smouldering fire where a tin coffee-pot stood amid the ashes. One man had his leg roughly tied up in sticks. It was Jean of the Evil Eye, who looked hard at the Abbé Susini, and then turning, indicated with a nod the Count de Vasselot who sat leaning against a tree. The count recognized Susini and nodded vaguely. His face, once bleached by long confinement, was burnt to a deep red; his eyes were quite irresponsible.
“He is worse,” said Jean, without lowering his voice. “Sometimes I can only keep him here by force. He thinks the whole island is looking for him—he never sleeps.”
Jean was interrupted by the evil-faced boy, who had risen, and was peering down towards the gates of the defile.
“There is a carriage on the road,” he said.
They all listened. There were three other men whom the abbé knew by sight and reputation. One by one they rose to their feet and slowly cocked their old-fashioned single-barrelled guns.
“It is the carriage from Olmeta—must be going to Perucca,” reported the boy.
And at the word Perucca, the count scrambled to his feet, only to be dragged back by Jean. The old man's eyes were alight with fear and hatred. He was grasping Jean's gun. The abbé rose and peered down through the bushes. Then he turned sharply and wrenched Jean's firearm from the count's hands.
“They are friends of mine,” he said. “The man who shoots will be shot by me.”
All turned and looked at him. They knew the abbé and the gun. And while they looked, Denise and Mademoiselle Brun drove past in safety.
“Keep cool, and you command everybody.”
When France realized that Napoleon III had fallen, she turned and rent his memory. No dog, it appears, may have his day, but some cur must needs yelp at his heels. Indeed (and this applies to literary fame as to emperors), it is a sure sign that a man is climbing high if the little dogs bark below.
And the little dogs and the curs remembered now the many slights cast upon them. France had been betrayed—was ruined. The twenty most prosperous years of her history were forgotten. There was a rush of patriots to Paris, and another rush of the chicken-hearted to the coast and the frontier.
The Baron de Mélide telegraphed to the baroness to quit Fréjus and go to Italy. And the baroness telegraphed a refusal to do so.
Lory de Vasselot fretted as much as one of his buoyant nature could fret under this forced inactivity. The sunshine, the beautiful surroundings, and the presence of friends, made him forget France at times, and think only of the present. And Denise absorbed his thoughts of the present and the future. She was a constant puzzle to him. There seemed to be two Denise Langes: one who was gay with that deep note of wisdom in her gaiety, which only French women compass, with odd touches of tenderness and little traits of almost maternal solicitude, which betrayed themselves at such moments as the wounded man attempted to do something which his crippled condition or his weakness prevented him from accomplishing. The other Denise was clear-eyed, logical, almost cold, who resented any mention of Corsica or of the war. Indeed, de Vasselot had seen her face harden at some laughing reference made by him to his approaching recovery. He was quick enough to perceive that she was endeavouring to shut out of her life all but the present, which was unusual; for most pin their faith on the future until they are quite old, and their future must necessarily be a phantom.
“I do not understand you, mademoiselle,” he said, one day, on one of the rare occasions when she had allowed herself to be left alone with him. “You are brave, and yet you are a coward!”
And the resentment in her eyes took him by surprise. He did not know, perhaps, that the wisest men never see more than they are intended to see.
“Pray do not try,” she answered. “The effort might delay your recovery and your return to the army.”
She laughed, and presently left him. It is one thing to face the future, and another to sit quietly awaiting its approach. The majority of people spoil their lives by going out to meet the future, deliberately converting into a reality that which was only a dread. They call it knowing the worst.
The next morning Mademoiselle Brun, with a composed face and blinking eyes, mentioned casually to Lory that she and Denise were going back to Corsica.
“But why?” cried Lory; “but why, my dear demoiselle?”
“I do not know,” answered Mademoiselle Brun, smoothing her gloves. “It will, at all events, show the world that we are not afraid.”
De Vasselot looked at her non-committing face and held his peace. There was more in this than a man's philosophy might dream of.
“When do you go?” he asked after a pause.
“To-night, from Nice,” was the answer.
And, as has been noted, Denise and mademoiselle arrived at Bastia in the early morning, and drove to the Casa Perucca, in the face of more than one rifle-barrel. Mademoiselle Brun never asked questions, and, if she knew why Denise had returned to Perucca so suddenly, she had not acquired the knowledge from the girl herself, but had, behind her beady eyes, put two and two together with that accuracy of which women have the monopoly. She meekly set to work to make the Casa Perucca comfortable, and took up her horticultural labours where she had dropped them.
“One misses the Château de Vasselot,” she said one morning, standing by the open window that gave so wide a view of the valley.
“Yes,” answered Denise; and that was all.
Mademoiselle went into the garden with her leather gloves and a small basket. The odd thing about her gardening was, that it was on such a minute scale that the result was never visible to the ordinary eye. Denise had, it appeared, given up gardening. Mademoiselle Brun did not know how she occupied herself at this time. She seemed to do nothing, and preferred to do it alone. Returning to the house at midday, mademoiselle went into the drawing-room, and there found Denise and Colonel Gilbert seated at the table with some papers, and a map spread out before them.
Both looked up with a guilty air, and Denise flushed suddenly, while the colonel bit his lip. Immediately he recovered himself, and rising, shook hands with the new-comer.
“I heard that you had returned,” he said, “and hastened to pay my respects.”
“We were looking at the plans,” added Denise, hurriedly. “I have agreed to sell Perucca to Colonel Gilbert—as you have always wished me to do.”
“Yes; I have always wished you do it,” returned Mademoiselle Brun, slowly. She was very cool and collected, and in that had the advantage over her companions. “Has the colonel the money in his pocket?” she asked with a dry smile. “Is it to be settled this afternoon?”
She glanced from one to the other. If love is blind, he certainly tampers with the sight of those who have had dealings with him. Denise was only thinking of Perucca. She had not perceived that Colonel Gilbert was honestly in love with her. But Mademoiselle Brun saw it. She was wondering—if this thing had come to Gilbert twenty years earlier—what manner of man it might have made of him. It was a good love. Mademoiselle saw that quite clearly. For a dishonest man may at any moment be tripped up by an honest passion. Which is one of those practical jokes of Fate that break men's hearts.
“You know as well as I do,” said Colonel Gilbert, with more earnestness than he had ever shown, “that the sooner you and mademoiselle are out of the island the better.”
“Bah!” laughed mademoiselle. “With you at Bastia to watch over us, mon colonel! Besides, we Peruccas are invincible just now. Have we not burnt down the Château de Vasselot?”
Gilbert winced. Mademoiselle wondered why.
“I want it settled as soon as possible,” put in Denise, turning to the papers. “There is no need of delay.”
“None,” acquiesced mademoiselle. She wanted to sell Perucca and be done with it, and with the island. She was a woman of iron nerve, but the gloom and loneliness of Corsica had not left her at ease. There was a haunting air of disaster that seemed to brood over the whole land, with its miles and miles of untenanted mountains, its malarial plains, and deserted sea-board. “None,” she repeated. “But such transactions are not to be carried through, in a woman's drawing-room, by two women and a soldier.”
She looked from one to the other. She did not know why one wanted to buy and the other to sell. She only knew that her own inclination was to give them every assistance, and to give it even against her better judgment. It could only be, after all, the question of a little more or a little less profit, and she, who had never had any money, knew that the possession of it never makes a woman one whit the happier.
“Then,” said the colonel with his easy laugh—for he was inimitable in the graceful art of yielding—“Then, let us appoint a day to sign the necessary agreements in the office of the notary at Bastia. I tell you frankly I want to get you out of the island.”
The colonel stayed to lunch, and, whether by accident or intention, made a better impression than he had ever made before. He was intelligent, easy, full of information ando rara avis!proved himself to be a man without conceit. He never complained of his ill-fortune in life, but his individuality thrust the fact into every mind, that this was a man destined for distinction who had missed it. He seemed to be riding through life for a fall, and rode with his chin up, gay anddebonnaire.
Mademoiselle Brun felt relieved by the thought that the end of Corsica, and this impossible Casa Perucca, was in sight. She was gay as a little grey mouse may be gay at some domestic festival. She sent the widow to the cellar, and the occasion was duly celebrated in a bottle of Mattei Perucca's old wine.
With coffee came the question of fixing a date for the signature of the deed of sale at the notary's office at Bastia. And instantly the mouse skipped, as it were, into a retired corner of the conversation and crouched silent, watching with bright eyes.
“I should like it to be done soon,” said the colonel, who, at the suggestion of his hostess, had lighted a cigarette. He seemed more himself with a cigarette between his fingers to contemplate with a dreamy eye, to turn and twist in reflective idleness. “You will understand that my future movements are uncertain if, as now seems possible, the war is not over.”
“But surely it is over,” put in Denise, quickly.
The colonel shrugged his shoulders.
“Who can tell? We are in the hands of a few journalists and lawyers, mademoiselle. If the men of words say 'Resist,' we others are ready. I have applied to be relieved of my command here, since they are going to fortify Paris. Shall we say next week?”
“To-day is Thursday—shall we say Monday?” replied Denise.
“Make it Wednesday,” suggested Mademoiselle Brun from her silent corner.
And after some discussion Wednesday was finally selected. Mademoiselle Brun had no particular reason why it should be Wednesday, in preference to Monday, and, unlike most people in such circumstances, advanced none.
“We shall require witnesses,” she said as the colonel took his leave. “I shall be able to find two to testify to the signature of Denise.”
The colonel had apparently forgotten this necessity. He thanked her and departed.
“And on Wednesday,” he said, “I shall in reality have the money in my pocket.”
During the afternoon mademoiselle announced her intention of walking to Olmeta. It would be advisable to secure the Abbé Susini as a witness, she said. He was a busy man, and a journey to Bastia would of necessity take up his whole day. Denise did not offer to accompany her, so she set out alone at a quick pace, learnt, no doubt, in the Rue des Saints Pères.
“They will not shoot at an old woman,” she said, and never looked aside.
The priest's housekeeper received her coldly. Yes the abbé was at home, she said, holding the door ajar with scant hospitality. Mademoiselle pushed it open and went into the narrow passage. She had not too much respect for a priest, and none whatever for a priest's housekeeper, who kept a house so badly. She looked at the dirty floor, and with a subtle feminine irony, sought the mat which was lying in the road outside the house. She folded her hands at her waist, and still grasping her cheap cotton umbrella, waited to be announced.
The Abbé Susini received her in his little bare study, where a few newspapers, half a dozen ancient volumes of theology and a life of Napoleon the Great, represented literature. He bowed silently and drew forward his own horsehair armchair. Mademoiselle Brun sat down, and crossed her hands upon the hilt of her umbrella like a soldier at rest under arms. She waited until the housekeeper had closed the door and shuffled away to her own quarters. Then she looked the resolute little abbé straight in the eyes.
“Let us understand each other,” she said.
“Bon Dieu! upon what point, mademoiselle?”
Mademoiselle was still looking at him. She perceived that there were some points upon which the priest did not desire to be understood. She held up one finger in its neutral-coloured cotton glove, and shook it slowly from side to side.
“None of your theology,” she said; “I come to you as a man—the only man I think in this island at present.”
“At present?”
“Yes, the other is in France, recovering from his wounds.”
“Ah!” said the abbé, glancing shrewdly into her face. “You also have perceived that he is a man—that. But there is our good Colonel Gilbert. You forget him.”
“He would have made a good priest,” said mademoiselle, bluntly, and the abbé laughed aloud.
“Ah! but you amuse me, mademoiselle. You amuse me enormously.” And he leant back to laugh at his ease.
“Yes, I came on purpose to amuse you. I came to tell you that Denise Lange has sold Perucca to Colonel Gilbert.”
“Sacred name of—thunder,” he muttered, the mirth wiped away from his face as if with a cloth. He sat bolt upright, glaring at her, his restless foot tapping on the floor.
“Ah, you women!” he ejaculated after a pause.
“Ah, you priests!” returned Mademoiselle Brun, composedly.
“And you did not stop it,” he said, looking at her with undisguised contempt.
“I have no control. I used to have a little; now I have none.”
She finished with a gesture, describing the action of a leaf blown before the wind.
“But I have put off the signing of the papers until Wednesday,” she continued. “I have undertaken to provide two witnesses, yourself if you will consent, the other—I thought we might get the other from Fréjus between now and Wednesday. A boat from St. Florent to-night could surely, with this wind, reach St. Raphael to-morrow.”
The abbé was looking at her with manifest approval.
“Clever,” he said—“clever.”
Mademoiselle Brun rose to go as abruptly as she had come.
“Personally,” she said, “I shall be glad to be rid of Perucca for ever—but I fancied there are reasons.”
“Yes,” said the priest, slowly, “there are reasons.”
“Oh! I ask no questions,” she snapped out at him with her hand on the door. On the threshold she paused. “All the same,” she said, “I do ask a question. Why does Colonel Gilbert want to buy?”
The priest threw up his hands in angry bewilderment.
“That is it!” he cried. “I wish I knew.”
“Then find out,” said mademoiselle, “between now and Wednesday.”
And with a curt nod she left him.
“All nature is but art, unknown to thee!All chance, direction which thou canst not see.”
It rained all night with a semi-tropical enthusiasm. The autumn rains are looked for in these latitudes at certain dates, and if by chance they fail, the whole winter will be disturbed and broken. With sunrise, however, the clouds broke on the western side of the island, and from the summit of the great Perucca rock the blue and distant sea was visible through the grey confusion of mist and cloud. The autumn had been a dry one, so the whole mountain-side was clothed in shades of red and brown, rising from the scarlet of the blackberry leaves to the deep amber of the bare rock, where all vegetation ceased. The distant peeps of the valley of Vasselot glowed blue and purple, the sea was a bright cobalt, and through the broken clouds the sun cast shafts of yellow gold and shimmering silver. The whole effect was dazzling, and such as dim Northern eyes can scarce imagine.
Mademoiselle Brun, who had just risen from the table where she and Denise had had their early breakfast of coffee and bread, was standing by the window that opened upon the verandah where old Mattei Perucca had passed so many hours of his life.
“One should build on this spot,” she began, “a convalescent home for atheists.”
She broke off, and staggered back. The room, the verandah, the whole world it seemed, was shaking and vibrating like a rickety steam-engine. For a moment the human senses were paralyzed by a deafening roar and rattle. Mademoiselle Brun turned to Denise, and for a time they clung to each other; and then Denise, whose strong young arms half lifted her companion from the ground, gained the open window. She held there for a moment, and then staggered across the verandah and down the steps, dragging mademoiselle with her.
There was no question of speech, of thought, of understanding. They merely stood, holding to each other, and watching the house. Then a sudden silence closed over the world, and all was still. Denise turned and looked down into the valley, smiling beneath them in its brilliant colouring. Her hand was at her throat as if she were choking. Mademoiselle, shaking in every limb, turned and sat down on a garden seat. Denise would not sit, but stood shaking and swaying like a reed in a mistral. And yet each in her way was as brave a woman as could be found even in their own country.
Mademoiselle Brun leant forward, and held her head between her two hands, while she stared at the ground between her feet. At last speech caine to her, but not her natural voice.
“I suppose,” she said, passing her little shrivelled hand across her eyes, “that it was an earthquake.”
“No,” said Denise. “Look!” And she pointed with a shaking finger down towards the river.
A great piece of the mountain-side, comprising half a dozen vine terraces, a few olive terraces, and a patch of pinewood, had fallen bodily down into the river-bed, leaving the slope a bare and scarified mass of rock and red soil. The little Guadelle river, a tributary of the Aliso, was completely dammed. Perucca was the poorer by the complete disappearance of one of its sunniest slopes, but the house stood unhurt.
“No more will fall,” said Denise presently. “See; there is the bare rock.”
Mademoiselle rose, and came slowly towards Denise. They were recovering from their terror now. For at all events, the cause of it lay before them, and lacked the dread uncertainty of an earthquake. Mademoiselle gave an odd laugh.
“It is the boundary-line between Perucca and Vasselot,” she said, “that has fallen into the valley.”
Denise was thinking the same thought, and made no answer. The footpath from the château up to the Casa by which Gilbert had come on the day of Mattei Perucca's death, by which he had also ridden to the château one day, was completely obliterated. Where it had crept along the face of the slope, there now rose a bare red rock. There was no longer a short cut from the one house to the other. It made Perucca all the more inaccessible.
“Curious,” whispered Mademoiselle Brun to herself, as she turned towards the house. She went indoors to get a hat, for the autumn sun was now glaring down upon them.
When she came out again, Denise was sitting looking thoughtfully down into the valley where had once stood the old château, now gone, to which had led this pathway, now wiped off the face of the earth.
“There is assuredly,” she said, without looking round, “a curse upon this country.”
Which Seneca had thought eighteen hundred years before, and which the history of the islands steadily confirms.
Mademoiselle was drawing on her gloves, and carried her umbrella.
“I am going down the pathway to look at it all,” she said.
There was nothing to be done. When Nature takes things into her own hands, men can only stand by and look. Denise was perhaps more shaken than the smaller, tougher woman. She made no attempt to accompany mademoiselle, but sat in the shade of a mimosa tree, and watched her descend into the valley, now appearing, now hidden, in the brushwood.
Mademoiselle Brun made her way to the spot where the pathway was suddenly cut short by the avalanche of rock and rubble and soil. It happened to be the exact spot where Colonel Gilbert's heavy horse had stumbled months before, where the footpath crossed the bed of a small mountain torrent. A few loosened stones had come bowling down the slope, set free by the landslip. These had fallen on to the pathway, and there shattered themselves into a thousand pieces. Mademoiselle stood among thedébris. She looked down in order to make sure of her foothold, and something caught her eye. She knelt down eagerly, and then, looking up, glanced round surreptitiously like a thief. She could not see the Casa Perucca. She was alone on this solitary mountain-side. Slowly she collected thedébrisof the broken rock, which was mixed with a red powdery soil.
“Ciel!” she whispered, “Ciel! what fools we have all been!”
She rose from her knees with one clasped handful of rubble. Slowly and thoughtfully she climbed the hill again. On the terrace, where she arrived hot and tired, the widow Andrei met her. The woman had been to the village on an errand, and had returned during mademoiselle's absence.
“The Abbé Susini awaits you in the library,” she said. “He asked for you and not for mademoiselle, who has gone to her own garden.”
Mademoiselle hurried into the library. The arrival of the abbé at this moment seemed providential, though the explanation of it was simple enough.
“I came,” he said, looking at her keenly, “on a fool's errand. I came to ask whether the ladies were afraid.”
Mademoiselle gave a chilly smile.
“The ladies were not afraid, Monsieur l'Abbé,” she said. “They were terrified—since you ask.”
She went to a side-table and brought a newspaper; for even in her excitement she was scrupulously tidy. She laid it on the table in front of the abbé, rather awkwardly with her left hand, and then, holding her right over the newspaper, she suddenly opened it, and let fall a little heap of stones and soil. Some of the stones had a singular rounded appearance.
The abbé treated her movements with the kindly interest offered at the shrine of childhood or imbecility. It was evident that he supposed that the landslip had unhinged Mademoiselle Brun's reason.
“What is that?” he asked soothingly, contemplating the mineral trophy.
“I think,” answered mademoiselle, “that it is the explanation.”
“The explanation of what, if one may inquire?”
“Of your precious colonel,” said mademoiselle. “That is gold, Monsieur L'Abbé. I have seen similar dirt in a museum in Paris.” She took up one of the pebbles. “Scrape it with your knife,” she said, handing it to him.
The abbé obeyed her, and volunteered on his own account to bite it. He handed it back to her with the marks of his teeth on it, and one side of it scraped clean showing pure gold. Then he walked pensively to the window, where he stood with his back turned to her in deep thought for some minutes. At length he turned on his heel and looked at her.
“It began,” he said, holding up one finger and shaking it slowly from side to side, which seemed to indicate that his hearer must be silent for a while, “long ago. I see it now.”
“Part of it,” corrected mademoiselle, inexorably.
“He must have discovered it two years ago when he first surveyed this country for the proposed railway. I see now why that man from St. Florent shot Pietro Andrei on the high-road. Pietro Andrei was in the way, and a little subtle revival of a forgotten vendetta secured his removal. I see now whence came the anonymous letter intended to frighten Mattei Perucca away from here. It frightened him into the next world.”
“And I see now,” interrupted the refractory listener, “why Denise received an offer for the estate before she had become possessed of it, and an offer of marriage before we had been here a month. But he tripped and fell then,” she concluded grimly.
“And all for money,” said the abbé, contemptuously.
“Wait,” said mademoiselle—“wait till you have yourself been tempted. So many fall. It must be greater than we think, that temptation. You and I perhaps have never had it.”
“No,” replied the abbé, simply. “There has never been more than a sou in my poor-box at the church. I see now,” continued Susini, “who has been stirring up this old strife between the Peruccas and the Vasselots—offering, as he was, to buy from one and the other alternately. Thisdirt, mademoiselle, must lie on both estates.”
“It lies between the two.”
The priest was deep in thought, rubbing his stubbly chin with two fingers.
“I see so much now,” he said at length, “which I never understood before.”
He turned towards the window, and looked down at the rocky slope with a new interest.
“There must be a great quantity of it,” he said reflectively. “He has walked over so many obstacles to get to it, with his pleasant laugh.”
“He has walked over his own heart,” said mademoiselle, persistently contemplating the question from the woman's point of view.
The priest moved impatiently.
“I was thinking of men's lives,” he said. Then he turned and faced her with a sudden gleam in his eye. “There is one thing yet unexplained—the burning of the Château de Vasselot. An empty house does not ignite itself. Explain me that.”
Mademoiselle shrugged her shoulders.
“That still remains to be explained,” she said. “In the mean time we must act.”
“I know that—I know that,” he cried. “I have acted! I am acting! De Vasselot arrives in Corsica to-morrow night. A letter from him crossed the message I sent to him by a special boat from St. Florent last night.”
“What brings him here?”
The abbé turned and looked at her with scorn.
“Bah!” he cried. “You know as well as I. It is the eyes of Mademoiselle Denise.”
He took his hat and went towards the door.
“On Wednesday morning, if you do not see me before, at the office of the notary, in the Boulevard du Palais at Bastia,” he said. “Where there will be a pretty salad for Mister the Colonel, prepared for him by a woman and a priest—eh! Both your witnesses shall be there, mademoiselle—both.”
He broke off with a laugh and an upward jerk of the head.
“Ah! but he is a pretty scoundrel, your colonel.”
“He is not my colonel,” returned Mademoiselle Brun. “Besides, even he has his good points. He is brave, and he is capable of an honest affection.”
The priest gave a scornful laugh.
“Ah! you women,” he cried. “You think that excuses everything. You do not know that if it is worth anything it should make a man better instead of worse. Otherwise it is not worth a snap of my finger—your honest affection.”
And he came back into the room on purpose to snap his finger, in his rude way, quite close to Mademoiselle Brun's parchment face.