The Isle of Unrest

by Henry Seton Merriman

  CHAPTER VII.

  JOURNEY’S END.

  “The offender never pardons.”

  De Vasselot returned to the Baroness de Mélide’s pretty drawing-room, andthere, after the manner of his countrymen, made himself agreeable in thatvivacious manner which earns the contempt of all honest and, if one maysay so, thick-headed Englishmen. He laughed with one, and with anotheralmost wept. Indeed, to see him sympathize with an elderly countess whosedog was grievously ill, one could only conclude that he too had placedall 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, hedescribed the arrival of the idea, apparently from heaven, upon his head,and then a sideward jerk of the arm seemed to indicate the sudden andirrevocable making up of his own mind.

  “But what for?” cried the lady. “You were not even born there. Yourfather died thirty years ago--you will not even find his tomb. Your dearmother left the place in horror, just before you were born. Besides, youpromised her that you would never return to Corsica--and she who has beendead 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,” answeredLory. “Since there is no one left behind to be anxious on my account, itis 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,” saidthe baroness, with a gay glance of her brown eyes; “and you may ask--andask!”

  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 smalltrading steamer that rolled sideways into Calvi Bay, on the shoulder, asit were, of one of those March mistrals which serve as the last kick ofthe dying winter. De Vasselot had taken the first steamer he could findat Marseilles, with a fine disregard for personal comfort, which was partof his military training and parcel of his sporting instincts. He was,like many islanders, a good sailor, for, strange as it may seem, a manmay inherit from his forefathers not only a taste for the sea, but astout heart to face its grievous sickness.

  There are few finer sights than Calvi Bay when the heavens are clear andthe great mountains of the interior tower above the bare coast-hills. Butnow the clouds hung low over the island, and the shape of the heights wasonly suggested by a deeper shadow in the grey mist. The little townnestling on a promontory looked gloomy and deserted with its small squarehouses and medieval fortress--Calvi the faithful, that fought so bravelyfor the Genoese masters whose mark lies in every angle of its squarestronghold; Calvi, where, if (as seems likely) the local historian is tobe believed, the greatest of all sailors was born, within a day’s ride ofthat other sordid little town where the greatest of all soldiers firstsaw the light. Assuredly Corsica has done its duty--has played its partin the world’s history--with Christopher Columbus and Napoleon as leadingactors.

  De Vasselot landed in a small boat, carrying his own simple luggage. Hehad not been very sociable on the trading steamer; had dined with thecaptain, and now bade him farewell without an exchange of names. There isa small inn on the wharf facing the anchorage and the wave-washed stepswhere the fishing-boats lie. Here the traveller had a better lunch thanthe exterior of the house would appear to promise, and found it easyenough to keep his own counsel; for he was now in Corsica, where silenceis 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 areparts of the road impassable for a carriage in this wind.”

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

  The horse presently appeared, a little thin beast, all wires, carryingits 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 ofthe high Spanish saddle with a piece of tarry rope and simple nauticalknots.

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

  “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 usualfavoured 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 knewalmost by heart; for he was an officer of the finest cavalry in theworld, and knew his business as well as any. And it is the business ofthe individual trooper to find his way in an unknown country. That acouple of hours’ hard riding brought him to his own lands, de Vasselotknew not nor heeded, for he was aware that he could establish his rightsonly by force of martial law, and with a miniature army at his back; forcivil law here is paralyzed by a cloud of false witnesses, while equityis administered by a jury which is under the influence of the twostrongest of human motives, greed and fear.

  At times the solitary rider mounted into the clouds that hung low uponthe hills, shutting in the valleys beneath their grey canopy, and againdescended to deep gorges; where brown water churned in narrow places. Andat all times he was alone. For the Government has built roads throughthese rocky places, but it has not yet succeeded in making traffic uponthem.

  With the quickness of his race de Vasselot noted everything--the trend ofthe watersheds, the colour of the water, the prevailing wind as indicatedby the growth of the trees--a hundred petty details of Nature which wouldescape any but a trained comprehension, or that wonderful eye with whichsome men are born, who cannot but be gipsies all their lives, whetherfate has made them rich or poor; who cannot live in towns, but mustbreathe the air of open heaven, and deal by sea or land with the wondrousworks of God.

  It was growing dusk when de Vasselot crossed the bridge that spans theAliso--his own river, that ran through and all around his own land--andurged his tired horse along the level causeway built across the oldriver-bed into the town of St. Florent. The field-workers were returningfrom vineyard and olive grove, but appeared to take little heed of him ashe trotted past them on the dusty road. These were no heavy, agriculturalboors, of the earth earthy, but lithe, dark-eyed men and women, whotilled the ground grudgingly, because they had no choice between that andstarvation. Their lack of curiosity arose, not from stupidity, but from asort of pride which is only seen in Spain and certain South AmericanStates. 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 crumblinghouses. It was a house like another--that is to say, the ground floor wasa stable, while the family lived above in an atmosphere of its own andthe stable drainage.

  The traveller gave Rutali a small coin, which was coldly accepted--for aCorsican 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, wentthrough his paternal acres with a map. His intention was to catch aglimpse of the Chateau de Vasselot, and walk on to the village of Olmeta,and there beg bed and board from his faithful correspondent, the AbbéSusini.

  He
followed the causeway across the marsh to the mouth of the river, andhere turned to the left, leaving the _route nationale_ to Calvi on theright. That which he now followed was the narrower _routedepartementale_, which borders the course of the stream Guadelle, atributary to the Aliso. The valley is flat here--a mere level of riverdeposit, damp in winter, but dry and sandy in the autumn. Here arecornfields and vineyards all in one, with olives and almonds growing amidthe wheat--a promised land of milk and honey. There are no walls, butgreat hedges of aloe and prickly pear serve as a sterner landmark. At theside of the road are here and there a few crosses--the silent witnessesthat stand on either side of every Corsican road--marking the spot wheresuch 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 ofthe 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 ofstone; a square-towered church, built just where the cultivation ceasesand the rocks and the macquis begin.

  De Vasselot quitted the road where it begins sharply to ascend, and tookthe narrow path that follows the course of the river, winding through theolive groves around the great rock that forms a shoulder of Monte Torre,and breaks off abruptly in a sheer cliff. He looked upward with asoldier’s eye at this spot, designed by nature as the site of a fortwhich could command the whole valley and the roads to Corte and Calvi.Far above, amid chestnut trees and some giant pines, De Vasselot couldsee 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 longeras he followed the path, winding as the river wound through the narrowflat valley.

  Suddenly he came out of the defile into a vast open country, spread outlike 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 roadby which Colonel Gilbert had ridden to the Casa Perucca not so very longbefore. At the base of the fan runs the Aliso, without haste, bordered oneither bank by oleanders growing like rushes. Halfway down the slope is alump of land which looks like, and probably is, a piece of the mountaincast off by some subterranean disturbance, and gently rolled down intothe valley. It stands alone, and on its summit, three hundred feet abovethe 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 inthe reflected light of the western sky. He knew that he was looking atthe 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 copperbeech, a square stone house with smokeless chimneys, and, so far as wasvisible, every shutter shut. The owner of it and all these lands, thebearer of the name that was written here upon the map, walked slowly outinto the open country. He turned once and looked back at the toweringcliff behind him, the rocky peninsula where the Casa Perucca stood amidstits great trees, and hid the village of Olmeta, perched on the mountainside behind it.

  The short winter twilight was almost gone before de Vasselot reached thebase of the mound of half-shattered rock upon which the chateau had beenbuilt. The wall that had once been the outer battlement of the oldstronghold was so fallen into disrepair that he anticipated no difficultyin finding a gap through which to pass within the enclosure where thehouse was hidden; but he walked right round and found no such breach.Where the wall of rock proved vulnerable, the masonry, by some curiouschance, 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 returnthe next day with the Abbé Susini. But he was tired, and having failed togain an entrance, was put out and angry, when at length he found himselfnear the great door built in the solid wall on the north-west side of theruin. A rusty bell-chain was slowly swinging in the wind, which wasfreshening again at sunset, as the mistral nearly always does when it isdying. With some difficulty he succeeded in swinging the heavy bellsuspended inside the door, so that it gave two curt clangs as of a rustytongue against moss-grown metal.

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

  “Good God!” he whispered. “Good God!”

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

  “I am--” he began.

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

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

  De Vasselot went into the house, which was all dark by reason of theclosed shutters. There was a large room, opposite to the front door,dimly indicated by the daylight behind him. He went into it, and wasgoing straight to one of the windows to throw back the shutters, when asharp click brought him round on his heels as if he had been shot. In afar corner of the room, in a dark doorway, stood a shadow. The click wasthat 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 andflashing eyes facing the doorway. A man stood there watching him--a manof 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 waswhite; with a small quick face like his own, but it was bleached. Theeyes 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.”