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 Va.s.selot returned to the Baroness de Melide"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 a.s.suredly 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, ingrat.i.tude!" 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 Va.s.selot 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 Va.s.selot had taken the first steamer he could find at Ma.r.s.eilles, 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. a.s.suredly Corsica has done its duty--has played its part in the world"s history--with Christopher Columbus and Napoleon as leading actors.
De Va.s.selot 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 impa.s.sable for a carriage in this wind."
De Va.s.selot 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 Va.s.selot"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 Va.s.selot 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 Va.s.selot 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 Va.s.selot 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 G.o.d.
It was growing dusk when de Va.s.selot 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 Va.s.selot 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 Va.s.selot, went through his paternal acres with a map. His intention was to catch a glimpse of the Chateau de Va.s.selot, and walk on to the village of Olmeta, and there beg bed and board from his faithful correspondent, the Abbe 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 p.r.i.c.kly 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 Va.s.selot 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 Va.s.selot 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 Va.s.selot.
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 Va.s.selot 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 antic.i.p.ated no difficulty in finding a gap through which to pa.s.s within the enclosure where the house was hidden; but he walked right round and found no such breach.