The Isle of Unrest | Page 9

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