CE QUE FEMME VEUT.
“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 the _débris_.
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 the
_débris_ of 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. This _dirt_, 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.