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.