The Isle of Unrest Part 33

"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 e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed 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 Frejus between now and Wednesday. A boat from St. Florent to-night could surely, with this wind, reach St. Raphael to-morrow."

The abbe 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.

CHAPTER XXIV.

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 lat.i.tudes 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 Va.s.selot glowed blue and purple, the sea was a bright cobalt, and through the broken clouds the sun cast shafts of yellow gold and s.h.i.+mmering 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 Mattel Perucca had pa.s.sed 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, pa.s.sing 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 ma.s.s 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 Va.s.selot," she said, "that has fallen into the valley."

Denise was thinking the same thought, and made no answer. The footpath from the chateau 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 chateau 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 chateau, now gone, to which had led this pathway, now wiped off the face of the earth.

"There is a.s.suredly," 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 _debris_.

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 surrept.i.tiously like a thief. She could not see the Casa Perucca.

She was alone on this solitary mountain-side. Slowly she collected the _debris_ 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.