“Hark ye, Ors’ Anton’,” quoth the bandit, as he caught hold of the horse’s bridle, “shall I tell you the truth? Well, no offence to you! I’m sorry for those poor young fellows! You’ll pardon me, I hope; so good-looking, so strong, so young. Orlanduccio, I’ve shot with him so often! Only four days ago he gave me a bundle of cigars, and Vincentello—he was always so cheery. Of course you’ve only done what you had to do, and indeed the shot was such a splendid one, nobody could regret it. But I, you see, had nothing to do with your vengeance. I know you’re perfectly in the right. When one has an enemy one must get rid of him. But the Barricini were an old family. Here’s another of them wiped out, and by a right and left too! It’s striking.”

As he thus spoke his funeral oration over the Barricini, Brandolaccio hastily guided Orso, Chilina, and Brusco, the dog, toward the Stazzona maquis.

CHAPTER XVIII

Meanwhile, very shortly after Orso’s departure, Colomba’s spies had warned her that the Barricini were out on the warpath, and from that moment she was racked by the most intense anxiety. She was to be seen moving hither and thither all over the house, between the kitchen and the rooms that were being made ready for her guests, doing nothing, yet always busy, and constantly stopping to look out of a window for any unusual stir in the village. Toward eleven o’clock, a somewhat numerous cavalcade rode into Pietranera. This was the colonel, with his daughter, their servants, and their guide. Colomba’s first word, as she welcomed them, was “Have you seen my brother?” Then she questioned the guide as to the road they had taken, and the hour of their departure, and having heard his answers, she could not understand why they had not met him.

“Perhaps,” said the guide, “your brother took the higher path; we came by the lower one.”

But Colomba only shook her head and asked more questions. In spite of her natural firmness of character, increased as it was by her proud desire to conceal any sign of weakness before strangers, she could not hide her anxiety, and as soon as she had informed them of the attempted reconciliation, and of its unfortunate issue, this was shared by the colonel and Miss Lydia. Miss Nevil became very uneasy, and wanted to have messengers sent off in every direction, and her father offered to remount at once and set out with the guide in search of Orso. Her guests’ alarm recalled Colomba to a sense of her duties as a hostess. She strove to force a smile as she pressed the colonel to come to table, and suggested twenty plausible reasons, which she herself demolished within an instant, to account for her brother’s delay. The colonel, feeling it to be his duty, as a man, to reassure the ladies, put forward his own explanation.

“I’ll wager,” he said, “that della Rebbia has come across some game or other. He has not been able to stand out against that temptation, and we shall soon see him come in with a heavy bag. ‘Pon my soul,” he went on, “we did hear four shots fired on the road. Two of them were louder than the others, and I said to my girl, ‘I’ll bet anything that’s della Rebbia out shooting! My gun is the only one that would make that noise.’”

Colomba turned pale, and Lydia, who was watching her closely, had no difficulty in guessing the suspicions with which the colonel’s conjecture had inspired her. After a few minutes’ silence, Colomba eagerly inquired whether the two louder reports had been heard before or after the others. But neither the colonel, his daughter, nor the guide had paid much attention to this all-important detail.

Toward one o’clock, as none of Colomba’s messengers had yet returned, she gathered all her courage, and insisted that her guests should sit down to table with her. But, except the colonel, none of them could eat. At the slightest sound in the square, Colomba ran to the window. Then drearily she returned to her place, and struggled yet more drearily to carry on a trivial conversation, to which nobody paid the slightest attention, and which was broken by long intervals of silence. All at once they heard a horse’s gallop.

“Ah! That must be my brother at last!” said Colomba, rising from her chair. But when she saw Chilina astride on Orso’s horse—“My brother is dead!” she cried, in a heart-rending voice.

The colonel dropped his glass. Miss Lydia screamed. They all rushed to the door of the house. Before Chilina could jump off her steed, she was snatched up like a feather by Colomba, who held her so tight that she almost choked her. The child understood her agonized look, and her first words were those of the chorus in Othello: “He lives!” Colomba’s grasp relaxed, and nimbly as a kitten Chilina dropped upon the ground.

“The others?” queried Colomba hoarsely. Chilina crossed herself with her first and middle finger. A deep flush instantly replaced the deadly pallor of Colomba’s face. She cast one fierce look at the Barricini dwelling, and then, with a smile, she turned to her guests.

“Let us go in and drink our coffee,” she said.

The story the bandit’s Iris had to tell was a long one. Her narrative, translated literally into Italian by Colomba, and then into English by Miss Nevil, wrung more than one oath from the colonel, more than one sigh from the fair Lydia. But Colomba heard it all unmoved. Only she twisted her damask napkin till it seemed as if she must tear it in pieces. She interrupted the child, five or six times over, to make her repeat again that Brandolaccio had said the wound was not dangerous, and that he had seen many worse. When she had finished her tale, Chilina announced that Orso earnestly begged he might be sent writing materials, and that he desired his sister would beseech a lady who might be staying in his house not to depart from it, until she had received a letter from him.

“That is what was worrying him most,” the child added; “and even after I had started he called me back, to bid me not forget the message. It was the third time he had given it to me.” When Colomba heard of her brother’s injunction she smiled faintly, and squeezed the fair Englishwoman’s hand. That young lady burst into tears, and did not seem to think it advisable to translate that particular part of the story to her father.

“Yes, my dear,” cried Colomba, kissing Miss Nevil. “You shall stay with me, and you shall help us.”

Then, taking a pile of old linen out of a cupboard, she began to cut it up, to make lint and bandages. Any one who saw her flashing eyes, her heightened colour, her alternate fits of anxiety and composure, would have found it hard to say whether distress at her brother’s wound, or delight at the extinction of her foes, were most affecting her. One moment she was pouring out the colonel’s coffee, and telling him how well she made it, the next she was setting Miss Lydia and Chilina to work, exhorting them to sew bandages, and roll them up. Then, for the twentieth time, she would ask whether Orso’s wound was very painful. She constantly broke off her own work to exclaim to the colonel:

“Two such cunning men, such dangerous fellows! And he alone, wounded, with only one arm! He killed the two of them! What courage, colonel! Isn’t he a hero? Ah, Miss Nevil! How good it is to live in a peaceful country like yours! I’m sure you did not really know my brother till now! I said it—‘The falcon will spread his wings!’ You were deceived by his gentle look! That’s because with you, Miss Nevil—Ah! if he could see you working for him now! My poor Orso!”

Miss Lydia was doing hardly any work, and could not find a single word to say. Her father kept asking why nobody went to lay a complaint before a magistrate. He talked about a coroner’s inquest, and all sorts of other proceedings quite unknown to Corsican economy. And then he begged to be told whether the country house owned by that worthy Signor Brandolaccio, who had brought succour to the wounded man, was very far away from Pietranera, and whether he could not go there himself, to see his friend.

And Colomba replied, with her usual composure, that Orso was in the maquis; that he was being taken care of by a bandit; that it would be a great risk for him to show himself until he was sure of the line the prefect and the judges were likely to take; and, finally, that she would manage to have him secretly attended by a skilful surgeon.

“Above all things, colonel,” she added, “remember that you heard the four shots, and that you told me Orso fired last.”

The colonel could make neither head nor tail of the business, and his daughter did nothing but heave sighs and dry her eyes.

The day was far advanced, when a gloomy procession wended its way into the village. The bodies of his two sons were brought home to Lawyer Barricini, each corpse thrown across a mule, which was led by a peasant. A crowd of dependents and idlers followed the dreary cortege. With it appeared the gendarmes, who always came in too late, and the deputy-mayor, throwing up his hands, and incessantly repeating, “What will Signor Prefetto say!” Some of the women, among them Orlanduccio’s foster-mother, were tearing their hair and shrieking wildly. But their clamorous grief was less impressive than the dumb despair of one man, on whom all eyes were fixed. This was the wretched father, who passed from one corpse to the other, lifting up the earth-soiled heads, kissing the blackened lips, supporting the limbs that were stiff already, as if he would save them from the jolting of the road. Now and then he opened his mouth as though about to speak, but not a cry came, not a word. His eyes never left the dead bodies, and as he walked, he knocked himself against the stones, against the trees, against every obstacle that chanced to lie in his path.

The women’s lamentations grew louder, and the men’s curses deeper, when Orso’s house appeared in sight. When some shepherds of the della Rebbia party ventured on a triumphant shout, their enemy’s indignation became ungovernable. “Vengeance! Vengeance!” exclaimed several voices. Stones were thrown, and two shots, fired at the windows of the room in which Colomba and her guests were sitting, pierced the outside shutters, and carried splinters of wood on to the table at which the two ladies were working. Miss Lydia screamed violently, the colonel snatched up a gun, and Colomba, before he could stop her, rushed to the door of the house and threw it violently open. There, standing high on the threshold, with her two hands outstretched to curse her enemies:

“Cowards!” she cried. “You fire on women and on foreigners! Are you Corsicans? Are you men? Wretches, who can only murder a man from behind. Come on! I defy you! I am alone! My brother is far away! Come! kill me, kill my guests! It would be worthy of you! . . . But you dare not, cowards that you are! You know we avenge our wrongs! Away with you! Go, weep like women, and be thankful we do not ask you for more blood!”

There was something terrible and imposing in Colomba’s voice and mien. At the sight of her the crowd recoiled as though it beheld one of those evil fairies of which so many tales are told on long winter evenings, in Corsica. The deputy-mayor, the gendarmes, and a few women seized the opportunity, and threw themselves between the two factions; for the della Rebbia herdsmen were already loading their guns, and for a moment a general fight in the middle of the square had appeared imminent. But the two parties were both leaderless, and Corsicans, whose rage is always subject to discipline, seldom come to blows unless the chief authors of their internecine quarrels are present. Besides, Colomba, who had learned prudence from victory, restrained her little garrison.

“Let the poor folks weep in peace,” she said. “Let the old man carry his own flesh home. What is the good of killing an old fox who has no teeth left to bite with, . . . Giudice Barricini! Remember the 2d of August! Remember the blood-stained pocket-book in which you wrote with your forger’s hand! My father had written down your debt! Your sons have paid it. You may go free, old Barricini!”

With folded arms and a scornful smile upon her lips, Colomba watched the bearers carry the corpses of her enemies into their home, and the crowd without it melt gradually away. Then she closed her own door, and, going back into the dining-room, she said to the colonel:

“I beg, sir, you will forgive my fellow-countrymen! I never could have believed that any Corsican would have fired on a house that sheltered strangers, and I am ashamed of my country.”

That night, when Miss Lydia had gone up to her room, the colonel followed her, and inquired whether they had not better get out of a village where they ran incessant risk of having a bullet through their heads, the very next morning, and leave this country, seething with treachery and murder, as soon as possible.

Miss Nevil did not answer for some time, and her father’s suggestion evidently caused her considerable perplexity. At last she said:

“How can we leave this poor young creature, just when she is so much in need of consolation? Don’t you think that would be cruel, father?”

“I only spoke on your account, child,” said the colonel. “And I assure you that if I once felt you were safe in the hotel at Ajaccio, I should be very sorry to leave this cursed island myself, without shaking that plucky fellow della Rebbia’s hand again.”

“Well then, father, let us wait a while, and before we start let us make quite sure we can not be of any use to them.”

“Kind soul!” said the colonel, as he kissed his daughter’s forehead. “It is a pleasure to see you sacrifice yourself for the sake of softening other people’s suffering. Let us stay on. We shall never have to repent having done right.”

Miss Lydia tossed sleeplessly to and fro in her bed. Sometimes she took the vague night sounds for preparations for an attack on the house. Sometimes, less alarmed on her own account, she thought of poor wounded Orso, who was probably lying on the cold earth, with no help beyond what she might expect from a bandit’s charity. She fancied him covered with blood, and writhing in hideous suffering; and the extraordinary thing was that whenever Orso’s image rose up before her mind’s eye, she always beheld him as she had seen him when he rode away, pressing the talisman she had bestowed upon him to his lips. Then she mused over his courage. She told herself he had exposed himself to the frightful danger he had just escaped on her account, just for the sake of seeing her a little sooner. A very little more, and she would have persuaded herself that Orso had earned his broken arm in her defence! She reproached herself with being the cause of his wound. But she admired him for it all the more, and if that celebrated right and left was not so splendid a feat in her sight as in Brandolaccio’s or Colomba’s, still she was convinced few heroes of romance could ever had behaved with such intrepidity and coolness, in so dangerous a pinch.

Her room was that usually occupied by Colomba. Above a kind of oaken prie-dieu, and beside a sprig of blessed palm, a little miniature of Orso, in his sub-lieutenant’s uniform, hung on the wall. Miss Nevil took the portrait down, looked at it for a long time, and laid it at last on the table by her bed, instead of hanging it up again in its place. She did not fall asleep till daybreak, and when she woke the sun had travelled high above the horizon. In front of her bed she beheld Colomba, waiting, motionless, till she should open her eyes.

“Well, dear lady, are you not very uncomfortable in this poor house of ours?” said Colomba to her. “I fear you have hardly slept at all.”

“Have you any news, dear friend?” cried Miss Nevil, sitting up in bed.

Her eye fell on Orso’s picture, and she hastily tossed her handkerchief upon it.

“Yes, I have news,” said Colomba, with a smile.

Then she took up the picture.

“Do you think it like him? He is better looking than that!”

“Really,” stammered Miss Nevil, quite confused, “I took down that picture in a fit of absence! I have a horrid habit of touching everything and never putting anything back! How is your brother?”

“Fairly well. Giocanto came here before four o’clock this morning. He brought me a letter for you, Miss Lydia. Orso hasn’t written anything to me! It is addressed to Colomba, indeed, but underneath that he has written ‘For Miss N.’ But sisters are never jealous! Giocanto says it hurt him dreadfully to write. Giocanto, who writes a splendid hand, offered to do it at his dictation. But he would not let him. He wrote it with a pencil, lying on his back. Brandolaccio held the paper for him. My brother kept trying to raise himself, and then the very slightest movement gave him the most dreadful agony in his arm. Giocanto says it was pitiful. Here is his letter.”

Miss Nevil read the letter, which, as an extra precaution, no doubt, was written in English. Its contents were as follows:

“MADEMOISELLE: An unhappy fate has driven me on. I know not what my enemies will say, what slanders they will invent. I care little, so long as you, mademoiselle, give them no credence! Ever since I first saw you I have been nursing wild dreams. I needed this catastrophe to show me my own folly.

“I have come back to my senses now. I know the future that lies before me, and I shall face it with resignation. I dare not keep this ring you gave me, and which I believed to be a lucky talisman. I fear, Miss Nevil, you may regret your gift has been so ill-bestowed. Or rather, I fear it may remind me of the days of my own madness. Colomba will give it to you. Farewell, mademoiselle! You are about to leave Corsica, and I shall never see you again. But tell my sister, at least, that I still possess your esteem—and I tell you, confidently, that I am still worthy of it.

“O.D.R.”

Miss Lydia had turned away while she read the letter, and Colomba, who was watching her closely, gave her the Egyptian ring, with an inquiring glance as to what it all meant. But Miss Lydia dared not raise her head, and looked dejectedly at the ring, alternately putting it on her finger and pulling it off again.

“Dear Miss Nevil,” said Colomba, “may I not know what my brother says to you? Does he say anything about his health?”

“Indeed,” said Miss Lydia, colouring, “he doesn’t mention it. His letter is in English. He desires me to tell my father—He hopes the prefect will be able to arrange–”

With a mischievous smile, Colomba sat down on the bed, took hold of both Miss Nevil’s hands, and, looking at her with her piercing eyes—

“Will you be kind?” she said. “Won’t you answer my brother’s letter? You would do him so much good! For a moment I thought of waking you when his letter came, and then I didn’t dare!”

“You did very wrong,” replied Miss Nevil. “If a word from me could—”

“I can’t send him any letter now. The prefect has arrived, and Pietranera is full of his policemen. Later on, we’ll see what we can do. Oh, Miss Nevil, if you only knew my brother, you would love him as dearly as I do. He’s so good! He’s so brave! Just think of what he has done! One man against two, and wounded as well!”

The prefect had returned. Warned by an express messenger sent by the deputy-mayor, he had brought over the public prosecutor, the registrar, and all their myrmidons, to investigate the fresh and terrible catastrophe which had just complicated, or it may be ended, the warfare between the chief families of Pietranera. Shortly after his arrival, he saw the colonel and his daughter, and did not conceal his fear that the business might take on an ugly aspect.

“You know,” he said, “that the fight took place without witnesses, and the reputation of these two unhappy men stood so high, both for bravery and cunning, that nobody will believe Signor della Rebbia can have killed them without the help of the bandits with whom he is now supposed to have taken refuge.”

“It’s not possible,” said the colonel. “Orso della Rebbia is a most honourable fellow. I’ll stake my life on that.”

“I believe you,” said the prefect. “But the public prosecutor (those gentry always are suspicious) does not strike me as being particularly well disposed toward him. He holds one bit of evidence which goes rather against our friend—a threatening letter to Orlanduccio, in which he suggests a meeting, and is inclined to think that meeting was a trap.”

“That fellow Orlanduccio refused to fight it out like a gentleman.”

“That is not the custom here. In this country, people lie in ambush, and kill each other from behind. There is one deposition in his favour—that of a child, who declares she heard four reports, two of which were louder than the others, and produced by a heavy weapon, such as Signor della Rebbia’s gun. Unluckily, the child is the niece of one of the bandits suspected of being his accomplices, and has probably been taught her lesson.”

“Sir,” broke in Miss Lydia, reddening to the roots of her hair, “we were on the road when those shots were fired, and we heard the same thing.”

“Really? That’s most important! And you, colonel, no doubt you remarked the very same thing?”

“Yes,” responded Miss Lydia quickly. “It was my father, who is so accustomed to firearms, who said to me, ‘There’s Signor della Rebbia shooting with my gun!’”

“And you are sure those shots you recognised were the last?”

“The two last, weren’t they, papa?”

Memory was not the colonel’s strong point, but as a standing rule, he knew better than to contradict his daughter.

“I must mention this to the public prosecutor at once, colonel. And besides, we expect a surgeon this evening, who will make an examination of the two bodies, and find out whether the wounds were caused by that particular weapon.”

“I gave it to Orso,” said the colonel, “and I wish I knew it was at the bottom of the sea. At least–Plucky boy! I’m heartily glad he had it with him, for I don’t quite know how he would have got off if it hadn’t been for my Manton.”